The end of the IT department

When people talk about their IT departments, they always talk about the things they’re not allowed to do, the applications they can’t run, and the long time it takes to get anything done. Rigid and inflexible policies that fill the air with animosity. Not to mention the frustrations of speaking different languages. None of this is a good foundation for a sustainable relationship.

If businesses had as many gripes with an external vendor, that vendor would’ve been dropped long ago. But IT departments have endured as a necessary evil. I think those days are coming to an end.

The problem with IT departments seems to be that they’re set up as a forced internal vendor. From the start, they have a monopoly on the “computer problem” – such monopolies have a tendency to produce the customer service you’d expect from the US Postal Service. The IT department has all the power, they’re not going anywhere (at least not in the short term), and their customers are seen as mindless peons. There’s no feedback loop for improvement.

Obviously, I can see the other side of the fence as well. IT departments are usually treated as a cost center, just above mail delivery and food service in the corporate pecking order, and never win anything when shit just works, but face the wrath of everyone when THE EXCHANGE SERVER IS DOWN!!!!!

At the same time, IT job security is often dependent on making things hard, slow, and complex. If the Exchange Server didn’t require two people to babysit it at all times, that would mean two friends out of work. Of course using hosted Gmail is a bad idea! It’s the same forces and mechanics that slowly turned unions from a force of progress (proper working conditions for all!) to a force of stagnation (only Jack can move the conference chairs, Joe is the only guy who can fix the microphone).

But change is coming. Dealing with technology has gone from something only for the techy geeks to something more mainstream. Younger generations get it. Computer savvyness is no longer just for the geek squad.

You no longer need a tech person at the office to man “the server room.” Responsibility for keeping the servers running has shifted away from the centralized IT department. Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere.

The transition won’t happen over night, but it’s long since begun. The companies who feel they can do without an official IT department are growing in number and size. It’s entirely possible to run a 20-man office without ever even considering the need for a computer called “server” somewhere.

The good news for IT department operators is that they’re not exactly saddled with skills that can’t be used elsewhere. Most auto workers and textile makers would surely envy their impending doom and ask for a swap.

In my part time work for [insert large US auto-manufacturer name here], I deal with what you’re describing almost every week. Their IT department has been tasked with ditching Lotus Notes and moving everything over to MS Exchange.

They’re paralyzed. But not necessarily only by the changing technology and how best to roll it out to a user base that’s been used to Notes for 15 years.

Rather, they themselves are at the mercy of the corporate HR and Legal departments. You see, everything IT rolls out at larger corporations has to have a “governance” around it, or it simply doesn’t get rolled out.

Corporate Communications is tasked with crafting the best communication plan for everyone. But they can’t write that until they know what features IT will implement. And they can’t move forward with turning features on without input from HR and Legal. It’s a vicious circle. In the meantime, users are left with a crippled MS Outlook install on their corporate laptops that doesn’t sync properly with Notes databases that are still in operation.

It’s ridiculous, and frustrating.

elbelcho

on 23 Feb 11

I feel that this article is a little out of touch with reality.

I am VERY grateful that so many services can be ‘outsourced’ to the web. Personally I feel like GMail and GDocs are better quality tools that Outlook and Office in 99% of use cases.

However, there will be a need for an IT department as long as users sit at desks with computers that closely resemble any modern day desktop / laptop.

There will ALWAYS be hardware problems, there will likely always be software that simply isn’t well suited to the web (analytical apps, scientific apps, etc).

Who is going to manage the Google apps accounts? Who is going to manage the cloud hosted apps? Who is going to even CHOOSE which hosted apps to use? And more importantly, who is going to address the day-to-day concerns of the average users in companies with thousands of employees?

Teja

on 23 Feb 11

I see what you’re saying, but I disagree. There is a huge gulf between being able to tweet / browse effortlessly and configuring an exchange server or even an outlook client.

These are the people that use tech every day -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ

Move to implementing enterprise security policies for Blackberry / Reinstalling operating systems / Cleaning up viruses? There will probably always be a need for an IT department.

An IT department is there to keep employees in check who are not even qualified to use a mouse. If everyone had to bring their own computer to work, the IT department would be a separate entity designed to bring a profit.

Anyone not qualified to use computer would have support costs taken out of their wages or would be driven out of the company financially if grossly incompetent.

But as the IT department instead is seen a cost, the real IT incompetent dead weights are just left to cause havoc in a companies infrastructure.

There will always be people who are above the technology curve, and people who are professionals in what they do, specialists. As long as that exists there will be little circles of haves and have nots. We have unlimited information available to us on the web, yet one employee can still make or break a small firm. I think you may be right in saying there will not be a need for a local IT, but those people will still be there looking at the machine someplace. Maybe just not in the office since everyone knows how to check their e-mail now.

Midwest Guy

on 23 Feb 11

You couldn’t be more right.

I will not shill the company I work for. We’re about the size of 37Signals and growing at about the same rate. A big part of what we do is outsourced tech support to customers (many of whom are rural – a few hours drive outside of the big city). We have some customers who only need 5 to 10 hours per year of support.

Do they mind that we do much of the work remotely? Absolutely not. Do we mind that they’re not “big ticket” customers? No way. They’re just glad to have someone they can talk to who actually knows how to fix the problem. We understand that a happy customer (even a very small one) has a tendency to recommend you to the entire world. With 100+ customers of varying shapes and sizes and hours, we have plenty of work to go around.

I’ve seen IT go from centralized, to decentralized to centralized again. From in house to outsourced and back again.

Any group in a company that starts putting its own interests ahead of the company’s best interests is eventually either going to lose or take down the company; especially small ones. Unfortunately, too many IT departments see themselves as risk minimizers and not business enablers.

Unless you are a tech company, IT is just a tool for executing a company’s business strategy. Yeah, you can do it yourself using many of the hosted tools out there if you have the time and ability. Or you can focus on your core talents (the real value you bring to the business) and bring someone on to do it for you.

The difference today is there are choices. You can stay pretty lean by using third party hosted “cloud” applications and get great functionality and services. Or you can bite the bullet and do some stuff internally if you need to (there are still good reasons to do so for some businesses). Or you can have a mix.

But all young people “get” today’s IT. I don’t think that is true any more than it has been in the past. Getting how to use IT to support a business strategy is vastly different than using Facebook to connect with your friends.

Staying small helps. You can fly under the government compliance radar that bigger organizations hire huge departments to comply with.

Ultimately, it really depends on what tools you need to support your business strategy. But if IT is not your department, at least bring on a person who can flesh out for you.

Choosing the right technology partners is more important than ever; it is potentially your competitive edge.

Pat Crofoot

on 23 Feb 11

For any environment, the costs are the same.

Employee laden stagnant IT departments are born out of not funding the resources to gain efficiencies.

Tiny IT departments with major services outsourced/cloud cost the same and you are burdened by vendor relationships, service levels, and COTS products.

Either way you choose, the CEO will attend some random conference and come back demanding some idiotic service that doesn’t fit the business model and IT will be the road block because they introduce common sense.

Joe

on 23 Feb 11

Change “IT” to “legal” or “HR” or “purchasing” and your article loses almost no meaning or import. This is not something unique to IT, but any large enough group.

EH

on 23 Feb 11

I see what you’re getting at, but I think it’s a limit. There has long been a slide toward managed services and smart-hands type “IT”, where it’s more Operations, as the employee base has gotten smarter. Also, the app stack has shrunk. There’s no more (for all intents and purposes) WordPerfect, or NetWare, or any other niche that used to be an entire industry. I used to have to turn down jobs because they were NetWare and I was Windows NT. Now it’s all just TCP/IP and whatever functions are present in TinyMCE. And Apache or WordPress or Google Analytics if you’re on the tech side of the company.

PC

on 23 Feb 11

As someone who works around “young people” (in schools) I can assure you that they do NOT “get IT”. They don’t “get” why the low to mid range desktops the schools have donated aren’t supposed to have games on them. They don’t “get” why they can’t change wallpaper (that they constantly call “screensavers”-thanks a bunch cellphones). They don’t “get” why they can’t go to pron and facebook like they do at home.
Sure they all “get” their iPods and iPads, they sure don’t “get” how to replace a bad RAM stick or video card.

I think it is just great that your company feels all warm and fuzzy about using web/cloud services like GMail or GDocs. In a personal capacity, I do too. However, when dealing with confidential information, be it academic, medical or corporate secrets, I don’t think your clients will be too happy knowing that Google is indexing the data.

And the corporate policies are there for a good reason. Some may seem lame or out of touch, but I’m sure that the party animals feel the same way about drunk driving or speed limit laws.

Rutger van der Linden

on 23 Feb 11

I think the article focused a bit too much on the hardware and end user support side of things, which makes it slightly tendentious. IT departments focused on 1st and 2nd line hardware support and end-user application support surely have had their longest time. Obviously because of user emancipation in the IT domain. However, with regard to network management, server management, capacity management, business availability/performance management, not to mention service management, departments with dedicated, educated support personnel, working together in an efficient procedural framework, with a focus on business optimization, this really doesn’t fly, not for a long time yet.

Mark Murphy

on 23 Feb 11

Younger generations get it. Computer savvyness is no longer just for the geek squad.

I feel like some of this misses the fact that U.S. companies are, by-and-large, earning money from intellectual property, the IT department allows the company to figure out how to own, manage, and control the ip created by their workers every day (and allows them to make sure it doesn’t become someone else’s IP).

Also, there are many industries that have a different set of rules or regulations to abide by (HIPAA?).

James Moline

on 23 Feb 11

This article seems a bit silly to me. Considering there is still a raging debate about the relative security of the cloud vs dedicated servers that aren’t exposed to the internet, do you really think server rooms in big corporations are going anywhere?

Then there are the complicated phone systems that IT departments everywhere have to support. There’s the management/distribution of company assets (laptops and the like) that has to be handled by someone. There’s the hefty task of managing Microsoft (and other) software licenses. There’s the fact that Windows (which remains the OS of choice among corporations) still has problems that are too difficult to resolve for even computer savvy youngsters. Many non-tech employees bill out to clients at such a high rate that even if they could fix their own problems, it’s more cost effective to have a $20-$50/hr IT guy swap out their laptop and then fix or RMA the buggy one (oh yeah, and you still need people to manage hardware RMAs). That’s just off the top of my head!

IT departments are a pain sometimes, but they remain a necessity in companies of a certain size. Some of their responsibilities may be going away, but they will be replaced by others as tech gets more advanced.

Nathan

on 23 Feb 11

SOX auditing…would you want all your financial data or credit card info from customers outside of your control with a third party provider? I would not and I do not think any leader would give the go ahead to make that decision. If you are publically traded and/or accept customer credit card info you need to protect that data. You are liable for all of that data. Putting trust in a vendor to keep it safe would be a horrible decision. This is why companies will always have their internal systems which are protected by IT.

Donald

on 23 Feb 11

It’s largely irrelevant to your point, but I take issue with your offhand critique of the US Postal Service. You’re talking about a company that’s able to reliably deliver documents across the entire United States, as well as far-flung military bases, for less than 50 cents, while providing mandatory pickup and delivery service to almost every residence in the country 6 days a week. By my lights, the US Postal Service provides excellent customer service.

Teja, you nailed this issue. Sure, IT professionals will likely always have a role in large enterprise. But smaller companies? What a waste of time and resources.

For the 20-person firm, no “IT Department” is needed nor in my opinion warranted. Hire a consultant. The consultant can take care of all these issues (including help-desk support for users) on a basis that is much more cost-effective than any single full-time-equivalent IT person would be. Plus, if you shop around, you’re much more likely to gain access to talent that would otherwise be too pricey.

Put another way, spending $40-50K per year for an entry-level IT staffer provides significantly less value than spending $500-1500 per month for a top-flight IT consultant on retainer or on an hourly basis.

George

on 23 Feb 11

I work alongside IT at a university and I just don’t buy the whole “younger generations are all computer whizzes” thing.

Yes, most of them can log in to Facebook, but their expertise gets shaky beyond that.

The problem isn’t so much that they are all computer illiterate but that their knowledge is extremely patchy. One kid knows how to properly uninstall an application from his Windows laptop, the kid next to her doesn’t realize there is a difference between “Firefox” and “the Internet”. Meanwhile the first kid just clicked on a scam anti-virus pop-up and has hosed her machine.

People see kids walking around with iPhones and netbooks and look at the growth of Facebook and Twitter and assume that kids must be tech savvy (and compared to their parents they might be).

But no one asks how often those kids buy new laptops because their current ones have “gotten slow”. No one asks if they actually understand the technical and security implications of what they are doing online (wait, it’s a bad idea to post pictures of me drinking at age 17?). Even more importantly, it seems like no one cares whether young people know how (or are able to easily learn how) to do anything but use social networking sites, as though Facebook is somehow the future of business communication.

There is a huge difference between using a computer frequently (which younger people tend to do) and knowing how to use and maintain a computer properly (which they don’t in many, many cases).

So I think central IT may change substantially, but it isn’t going anywhere in the long-run in the vast majority of organizations, at least if “young people” today are any indication.

Interesting comments here. I run a small but growing IT department for a medical device manufacturer.

Well run IT should align their departments interests solely with the interests of the business. The person in charge of IT should have a solid business as well as technology mind.

I do believe that most applications can be sourced to web apps now and in the future. IT pro’s should openly embrace this AND companies like yours should capitalize on it. Less babysitting means more time can be spend on focusing on how to improve and grow the business. But like @Doug mentioned the beauty is that organizations have a choice (in most cases).

There is no doubt that IT has established a position with the big boys in terms of corporate strategy within many companies today.

Is the IT department dead? Absolutely not. Its a pipe dream to think our current generation “just gets it”. The guys you attract probably do, but its a big world out there.

Then again, we are both bias. :)

The other side of midnight

on 23 Feb 11

David, I think you’re off your rocker. Let me give you one example: my organization is going through an almost violent, virulent flurry of switching to iPads. All fine and dandy, so you say who will then need the IT guys anymore?

Well, let me ask you just one thing: what happens when the notoriously unreliable floppy disk drives start failing on these newfangled iPads? Ha?

Absolutely! IT departments and CIO’s need to re-invent themselves. They need to move away from maintaining bespoke versions of do-it-yourself kits to building true business value using high productivity tools. Installing and managing commodity hardware infrastructure and basic business services is becoming less and less valued by organizations – essential, just as janitorial services are essential, but less valued. Taking 2 years to build a custom application rather than using an agile business platform is crazy.

Spencer Carnage

on 23 Feb 11

It’s not everyday that someone who is usually smart and insightful says something so obtuse and willfully ignorant. Bravo.

I work at a school district doing IT work. So I see the other side of this article. At least once a month I have go visit a teacher because they forgot the password they have been using for years. I will have to go fix there printer that some how mysteriously got unplugged. Fix the internet for them when they have unplugged there computer from the network jack.

Hosting Gmail instead of exchange does not fix some people natural ability to think or remember passwords. Quite a bit of the things I fix should be common sense to other people that they could fix themselves but they are scared of that box under there desk will bite them if they touch it.

Yes, we try to limit exactly what people can install but that is because they go out and start downloading something and get viruses on the computer which means we have to fix it. Most of the time these rigid rules and regulations are ideas that HR and upper management set forth and then it becomes IT’s job to deploy them and make them work.

So when people actually start using common sense and actually start thinking for themselves maybe the IT department will not be required but I do not see that happening any time soon.

This is the biggest load of nonsense I’ve seen on 37s, guys. Frequently you’re dealing with people who don’t know what a blog is (but know they want one, for the company). Even when you offshore/outsource/cloud the bejeezus out of your server needs, you’re still going to need support on the desktop level (let’s not even talk about the desktop talking to the server/cloud/flying spaghetti monster).

I had this exact same thought a week or two ago. I think what is going to propel this is the replacement of traditional OSes with newer Tablet-like OSes that forbid access to the filesystem.

I work in an office where 85% of staff don’t need anything beyond a browser, an email client, and Word/Excel.

Sc

on 23 Feb 11

They don’t “get” why they can’t change wallpaper

And… Why can’t they? This is exactly the type of mentality that makes doing away with “the IT department” so attractive to almost everyone outside of the IT department. Don’t get me wrong. I have worked in IT, and I understand why a lot of policies exist. But there tends to be a knee-jerk “you can’t do anything on our computers” policy that produces a real us vs. them environment. What is the harm in letting users change wallpaper if they don’t change it to something offensive? Policies that are restrictive and can only be explained by saying “because we say so” don’t make users like you, and don’t really generate any benefit.

Dan

on 23 Feb 11

IT is very much in the middle of things that I think a lot of people don’t realize. You’re oversimplifying what IT does in my opinion.

End user that hates their older outlook? – might be because management decided to cut that outlook upgrade out of the IT budget. “I’m an exec and I say we don’t need that.”

Company Exec that hates that the company is running on inefficient and dated software? – might be because your end users would require extensive training just to be able to use the new software

IT worker that wishes they could upgrade outlook? – I’ve been meaning to get to that but I need to go remove viruses from someone’s laptop for the 10th time.

There are a lot more variables here than a lot of people recognize. Managements view of IT, end-users capability, creation and enforcement of policies and standards, competency of your IT staff (in-house or out of house), the business’ reliance (or perception thereof) on IT, expectations of technology solutions, the list goes on. A lot of it comes from the top down but there are bottom up factors as well.

IT sits in the middle of all this and tries to make everyone happy while utilizing technology to further business goals. If you’re upset at IT there are probably root causes to that unhappiness that lie outside of IT. Eliminating IT won’t necessarily eliminate the causes of your unhappiness.

But then again, maybe it will make you feel better to be unhappy with a call center overseas rather than the guy down the hall.

We all want our cake and to eat it too.

Galt

on 23 Feb 11

In 12 years of working in IT I’ve never met a single technician who’s interested in job security in the manner you describe. MUCH more commonly I meet talented sysadmins who are desperately trying to talk a business out of a course of action that’s tantamount to IT suicide. This is why I’ve recommended outsourcing often. Either the vendor will be a second opinion to underscore my own, or when it crashes in flames it won’t be my name on it.

DK

on 23 Feb 11

This article is basically jibberish, time worn out mythology such as “young people automatically understand new technology”, “I can just hire someone else to do it”, and other unprovable points that seem right to someone with no understanding of what they’re talking about. Well, nativity isn’t understanding and you’re hiring someone to rape you if you don’t understand what it is they’re doing “managing those servers”.

IT departments that survive based on knowledge hoarding and poor customer service are the equivalent of accounting departments that survive on knowledge hoarding and poor customer service, they suck and someone should be fired. This is not an endemic problem with IT, it is a problem in your company.

Gmail might be a great idea, or it might not be. What are your archiving requirements, are they driven by any relevant regulatory requirements? What are the security implications, because even if technology is easier to use, it does not diminish, it likely increases, the security considerations around the use of that technology.

But taking this apart is a waste of time, it is the logical equivalent of someone saying “Marketing, what’s that about?”. It’s not a real position, just someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about pissing and moaning about things they haven’t taken the time to understand.

I joined a small tv production company of roughly 12 people a year and a half ago. Roughly half of us were post production people on Mac Pros connected to myriad external hard drives, and half general operations staff on a mix of Macs and PCs.

No IT department, and things were more or less just fine.

We’ve since grown to over 20 people, with a server feeding roughly ten systems in post production. We use an IT consultant from time to time, mostly to do with keeping the server and the systems it feeds happy, but otherwise it’s still just us going about our business.

There are bumps from time to time, but not nearly enough to warrent a full time IT person.

Our department is already significantly smaller than other districts our size because we abandon the old “IT” mentality. We don’t run Exchange or other MS server crap. We let people install pretty much whatever they want on their computers (it’s their responsibility). If something goes wrong with the computer we re-image the machine and they’re back to normal.

I definitely think the current role of IT support is going away. I think smart departments will transition to spending more time helping people come up with new, simpler ways to solve business problems.

Steve

on 23 Feb 11

You mention the word “security” but only in the term “job security”.

I’m really sorry, but this inflammatory bilge really irritates me. I’ve “done” IT for multinationals and startups, and the thing that is most obvious, is that if you leave the kids alone with their toys, you end up with a network which hardly ever works, more viruses than you can count, the mail server acting as a spam relay, the company being raided by FAST, the fans overheating in the PCs, the aircon never having been considered in the server cupboard, the backup plan being a mystery… need I go on?

You are treated like a child because YOU ARE ONE! Then we get ungrateful nonsense like “well, Google have a mailserver/doc server and why can’t I use your server to house all my MP3s?”

I’ve not ever started on how you stop marketing from flooding the sodding corporate website with half a ton of flipping flash-based, browser crippling, non-secure flash dross!

And if you let users change the wallpaper, there will always be some MUPPET that thinks porn is acceptable, or a “laugh”.

Having only worked in technology companies I have developed a similar opinion on the IT department, the problem I encountar most is lack of flexibility. However it has to be said (for technology companies primarily) they often do jobs I don’t want to do and would feel I was wasting my time doing, procuring, installing OS’s to name a couple.

Perhaps there is a huge opportunity there to set up a contracting IT company that is flexible and not annoying and doesn’t constantly insist on you restarting your machine.

CraigDanger

on 23 Feb 11

Wow, what a narrow scope you represent here. I think if you are thinking of only tech companies, then yes it applies. But There is this whole other world of verticals out there, filled with people who don’t all wear “Biz Stone glasses” and use only MacBooks and iPads. Retail, manufacturing, transportation to name a few. And any sales department regardless of industry.

This article is written from the perspective that “Here is how the world is in my little circle of 50 friends and coworkers, therefore this is how the entire world is.”

Which is too bad, because there are valid points, but the conclusions are all wrong.

Cads by

on 23 Feb 11

You vastly overestimate the technical knowledge of young people. They know how to log into Facebook and IM, that’s really about it.

Couchpundit

on 23 Feb 11

This is kind of a smug attitude towards what an IT department does.

Knowing how to use your computer or being resourceful enough to fix it because you can use Google hardly replaces anything but a helpdesk.

For a small company with no compliance standards, sure—outsource everything to Google apps and enjoy the targeted advertising based on your private business information.

But what about a company that deals with sensitive information—e-mail, research data, financial data, patient records, attorney-client privilege data, etc., AND its retention?
Who makes decisions about standardizing desktops for security and stability reasons for the company? Who actually understands the technology with experience and professionalism?

The new empowered geek users are probably just as good at dealing with those problems as they are keeping malware off of their computers—and infecting others. (Which, by the way, is abysmal.)

I think what’s more likely to be an endangered species is the smug blogger who lives in a vacuum.

C. Hardin

on 23 Feb 11

I find this article to be incredibly short-sighted. I fully agree with the statement “It’s entirely possible to run a 20-man office without ever even considering the need for a computer called “server” somewhere.”. But when we discuss organizations that approach a fourth digit, this is unfeasible.

As “robert” above mentions above, there’s the “human” issue. Who do we tell people to call when they forget their passwords, physically unplug something, or some plugin they installed changed the layout of their web browser and they can’t figure out how to do anything?

What do you tell people to do when they get a virus, or a power loss during an update breaks their Windows install and now they’ve lost all their data because they don’t have an “IT person” to come down and recover it?

You can come up with some sort of solution for everything, but it assumes a level of technical skill that the users won’t have without training. Sure, we can buy 50 GB Dropbox accounts for everyone. People will still habitually save their files to their My Documents folder and lose it without training to do otherwise and ignore this “Dropbox thing”.

People will still install “Smiley Packs” and browser toolbars and bog down their machine until the person can barely work. With a well-deployed IT department, their data is backed up and their machine can be swapped out or reimaged over the network in short order. Without? Call some tech in with a Windows XP disk and an external hard drive have him take over the user’s desk for half the day while he recovers the data and formats and reinstalls the OS and all their software. This might happen once a month in a 20 man office. But in a big corporation?

Not to mention that using, oh, gmail, is often unacceptable for many purposes, such as data protected by government laws (say, legal or medical information) or even extremely sensitive corporate emails/memos.

Your mileage may vary. But I absolutely don’t forsee IT departments going away anytime soon, especially as more and more technology comes on board. Users don’t want to have to maintain their own computers, and they shouldn’t have to.

The crucial factor here isn’t time, money or even hardware and software choices, it’s motivation. Small businesses are motivated to solve problems, find solutions, look for the most efficient tools for the job. Bookkeepers and secretaries are not, they just want to do their job with the least amount of hassle. They don’t care if it’s Google or Microsoft, local or cloud-based.

I’ll agree, corporate IT has become negative, but I’d say it’s because end user motivation is either lacking or is skewed.

Björn

on 23 Feb 11

Dan: I agree!
David: Do you have any experience from outsourcing?
Sc: Is it allways the IT-department that takes the stupid decision about the wallpaper? My experience is that it isn’t.

Michael Ströck

on 23 Feb 11

But taking this apart is a waste of time, it is the logical equivalent of someone saying “Marketing, what’s that about?”. It’s not a real position, just someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about pissing and moaning about things they haven’t taken the time to understand.

+1

But change is coming. Dealing with technology has gone from something only for the techy geeks to something more mainstream. Younger generations get it. Computer savvyness is no longer just for the geek squad.

Wow. That is so completely out of touch, I don’t even know where to start. Computer literacy beyond the “media player/MS Office/CTRL+ALT+DEL/web surfing”-level is demonstrably no higher than it was 15 years ago.

If you are running a company in such a way that a traditional IT department is needed in order to accomplish your market objectives then you are at a strategic and financial disadvantage over a competitor that operates without it.

Users that can’t bring and maintain a connected workstation to the cloud are as soon to be dead as a soldier that can’t operate and maintain his/her own weapon.

I’m now a contractor. And if I can’t connect then I don’t get paid. I can’t wait for the desktop support guy to fix my email while the same organization insists on putting blinders on the only reliable communication infrastructure I have.

Whatever the future of IT departments are it matters not to me. I fired them years ago.

Give me a call when, you are riddled with Virus’s, you’re PC’s ground to a halt, you’re mail doesn’t arrive or send.

I’ll take your call.. and then send you the bill..

Turning on a PC, doesn’t mean you can use a PC..

I will agree this position is changing, however the threats don’t, and i’m not going to clean up your mess because you’ve read a sunday supplement article about ie9.0 being great..

Michael Jones

on 23 Feb 11

As long as you have the Federal government regulating how you’re going to control your information and information flow (think Sarbox, import/export (like ITAR, EAR, etc.)) any company (or academic institution for that matter) of any size and complexity will have a hard time ‘going 100% to the cloud’ as you suggest.

One guy lamented above about HR and everyone else being involved, and let me explain to you that it’s not THEM that wants to be involved, it’s your company’s legal counsel who’s informing you/them they WILL be involved for all the legal reasons I just citied above.

It doesn’t mean that organizations won’t try to find a balance and blend of in and out of house IT operations (hell even big companies like Disney, Coke and others outsource a good portion of their IT), but at the end of the day they still ‘own’ it and maintain control of it cause their lawyers and the law says they have too.

I’m not beating up on lawyers BTW. I’ve just been around this block more than a couple of times. ;) It’s a nice article slant to woe the death of the IT department, but as always it’s a bit general to say it’s doable for everybody.

Chris

on 23 Feb 11

I should hope that a 20 man company can operate without a full time IT department.

Gmail is wonderful for cost reduction and reliability but a company must determine how much they value their communications. If your company is a law firm, medical practice, or a regulated business you will want to seriously need to consider privacy concerns.

I have to agree with some of the posts about the younger generation having youth granted technical skills. Setting up an iPad and playing angry birds is not the same as setting up an CISCO ASA so that Exec can access the company’s file server securely.

Just because the front end of applications look really simple does not mean the back end is.

Galt

on 23 Feb 11

What’s funny is that I’ve heard this all before. Vendors have been promising low maintenance/outsourced solutions for time immemorial. Business units have been railing about IT innefficiency for a similar timeframe.

While there have been vast improvements IT deparments remain and appear to be around for the next decade at least. Think about this, at what point will standard company X be able to not have anyone concerned with the companies technology or data? Where it’s stored, how it’s secured, who’s managing it? I’m not saying it’s impossible, just that the road is a lot longer than “young people get it now!”

Jo

on 23 Feb 11

Sometimes it’s not IT’s fault that it’s the way you describe in your article… I’ve worked in IT departments where we want to be cool, we want to be hands-off, we want to be as unobtrusive as possible. Where we hate IE6, where we’re trying to keep things as easy-and-convenient as possible, and where we hope you’d have the sense not to click stupid banners and that you won’t use your Facebook during work hours unless that’s part of your job.

We were given the command to lock down some machines so that all the users could do was use Office and the Internet, because the staff members using those machines could not get it through their heads that it wasn’t their home computers. Okay, fine, we didn’t want to, but okay. Those staff members were angry at us because of it, but it wasn’t IT that did this—it was the big bosses, because they were sick of us wasting time getting viruses off those machines every two days. Everyone else could use their computer properly, for some value of properly, so they weren’t locked down, which made these particular staffers very bitter.

Our repair policy used to be pretty liberal—until one day when someone raised an ungodly fuss over losing all of their personal data (...nothing business related) due to a hard drive failure that coincidentally happened after we handed the machine back… Now there are eighteen forms that need to be filled out, each with a strange dance of “sign here, here, here, initial here, sign here, check here and here and sign here again”; several tickets that need to be filed; things that need to be emailed and approved… It’s a huge hassle. We wanted to be as liberal as possible and got burned for it, and so the upstairs people who never work in our department handed down our new cover-our-asses documentation procedures…

Sigh.

It’s sometimes not IT’s fault… Sometimes it’s the bureaucracy handed down from above that makes IT into the monster that no one likes.

greatbiglizard

on 23 Feb 11

what you say is sort of true. if you happen to be a technically aware person in a technically aware company in one of the world’s most technically aware economies. However the idea that one day everyone will ‘just know’ how to connect to the every service they require in the cloud is just mental. what about hardware? security? strategy? IT depts may move out of companies and into the cloud themselves but someone will still need to ask if you’ve turned it off and on again.

Yes it depends on the size of a company, but having a good IT strategy can make a company more competitive and give you an advantage over everyone else who is using gmail/hotmail or whatever. Google Docs might be good for basic word processing, but if you want anything slightly more complex it’s just not good enough especially on the spreadsheet side.

While more people know how to use Facebook and use smartphones than did 10 years ago, that doesn’t mean they know how to put together a network that will scale well and be robust. What about data protection laws? In some counties data protection laws prohibit exporting data to countries with lesser data protection laws – does anyone with better legal knowledge than me know what this would mean for say a UK company using Google to store its data?

While I love Gmail and use it everyday, the inability to press print screen and paste a screenshot directly into an email without having to save it first and then attach it would be too much bother for most people when emailing a support desk – that’s where Outlook wins handsdown.

This article really struck a cord with me because although my previous company didn’t outsource their IT they utilised a typical IT set up (SBS server, Exchange etc) and all of the devs had to spend numerous hours a month unofficially supporting everything.

It’s not that I’m saying the company should’ve outsourced their IT infrastructure but rather they just should’ve utilised services and technology that didn’t need hours of support. For instance, instead of using Google Apps, they used Exchange, instead of using offsite Internet backup, they used manual tapes. All of these things essentially resulted in a lot time to keep running.

Y’know Exchange 2007 will automatically stop checking emails when the system drive only has 10% of HD space left (and won’t inform you)? Well I do… cause we had to figure that one out :)

Josh

on 23 Feb 11

Sure a business can be successful and operate without IT, but your article misses the point of the value of what a good IT member can do for the company. A good IT staff isn’t there to hinder anyone from doing their job, they’re they to make employees more efficient and prepare for worst case scenarios.

Would a group of non-technical folks be able to recognize the need for collaborative software instead of emailing the documents back and for or be able to prepare a recovery that’s available should it need be? How about setting up remote access to the network giving employees greater flexibility of where and when they can do their jobs?

This is exactly what I am facing. I lost my position in June an it is very difficult to find another job. I mostly been hearing they either do not have an I/T dept, their I/T is overseas, or their I/T is located in another state.

Very few will say that they handle all inhouse themselves and have no need for I/T; but some do say that. More and more I am getting emails from companies or prospective employers with a YAHOO or GMAIL address. very hard to tell which ones are SPAM or from real employers

I almost went into the IT field after I left the Navy. I’m really glad I didn’t for the reasons that you mention. I definitely agree that there is a transition happening and eventually only very large companies will need their own IT departments.

those ‘young people…’ – i’ve noticed some of them actually becoming less capable with the computer in general, because software is becoming easier to use…

I heard an account from a college level writing class professor who was shocked to learn that only 1 of her students out of about 40 knew how to setup a wordpress blog… these days, they just tweet and use facebook instead…

i guess its a new generation of facebook games that will teach office workers to configure for themselves regulatory compliant email servers and secure the email clients, setup mobile devices, printers, phone systems, label makers, web filters, and on and on… and not their local techs.

ha. ahaha. ahem. ; )

Clark

on 23 Feb 11

The fact that you even mentioned the Geek Squad shows you know nothing about IT and what it does.

Also, there is a reason you cannot install software on your pc without approval and that reason is because you have ZERO clue what you are installing, how it effects the network and the company at large. For instance, go ahead and install Myspace messenger… it does’t hurt anything right? Wait until someone finds and exploit and is stealing company data. There’s a reason It has to do things you all hate, it’s because we are your technological parent. We do what is best for you even whenever you do don’t like it,

Cute how so many intelligent people totally fail to understand what the article does and doesn’t say.
Tragically, those who fail to understand, are mostly people advocating IT, regardless.
Dare I say it? Yes, let’s: BLOODY TYPICAL!
There is a saying that might apply to some of you: if you are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. Maybe, this article is, in part, about you.
I love the IT love I get from some of our excellent IT staff. I loathe most of the IT policies. Yes, we are part of that “you shall use IE6 for safety reasons” culture and yes, I am part of the “I use chrome, it lets me install without an admin account. Bite me” crowd.
The premise of this article is correct. It is, for lots of environments, perfectly alright to work without an IT staff. Things they are changing. Especially, if your business doesn’t depend on you knowing that your browser isn’t your search engine, but just an extension of that search engine’s business model. Duh. If you use Safari, you don’t even have to wonder about that one btw.

While I agree with the sentiment of the article, I do believe the reality to be quite different.

The point about IT being a cost center is key. Until IT is on par with top level management you will be stuck with IE6. Why? Because some ignorant middle manager went to a conference and saw a demo on XYZ which requires IE6 and some ancient Active X control to run. Unfortunately this middle manager is related to the CFO somehow and was able to convince everyone that XYZ was vital to the companies continued success.

IT isn’t the problem, IT being hamstrung by ill informed upper management is the problem. IT wants to move fast, we love the new, but we have all been burned so we want to do our due diligence as well.

You spoke of GMail, but has anyone had to deal with internet filtering for regulatory compliance in conjunction with Google’s recent transition to federated Google Account logins? Try blocking access to personal GMail and still allow access to Corporate Gmail. It can be made to work via oAuth, but it took an IT department to make it work.

Until the IT department is given control over IT you will be stuck with a poor performing IT department. Until you allow your IT department to get rid of Microsoft Outlook, Windows etc… you will be stuck with not being able to install printers yourself, or trying new software. It isn’t the IT department’s fault.

Of course 37Signals is staffed by IT savvy folk so you don’t have these problems. Most of your clients are at least savvy enough to recognize quality products, so maybe they can do without an IT department now or in the near future. But you don’t represent everyone, the rest need an IT department. Maybe it will be just one person that is more of an IT evangelist, but that person will be needed.

Clak

on 23 Feb 11

It’s fun to dream about a day where you can do anything you want to do on your WORK computer without any problems. Sadly, it’s a well known fact the more freedom you give someone who doesn’t know how to use it, the more problems they have (I tried this on my network, I gave a group admin rights and they by FAR had the most problems). We set standards for a reason.

There have been more instances then ANY of us know about where IT has single handedly saved YOUR asses through fixing a problem you had at 8pm (taking away time from their family because you procrastinate) or saved the entire company when a building burnt down with a file server in it. Look to your neighbor at work and ask yourself “Do I really trust this guy in the event of an emergency to fix a corporation-wide IT disaster?”.... didn’t think so.

Fritz

on 23 Feb 11

IT employees aren’t going anywhere any time soon for two basic reasons:

1. Companies run on computers, whether they’re in-house or in the ‘cloud’ or whatever.

2. Computers fuck up.

I long for the day when nobody has to depend on me to babysit the Exchange server or the rest of the collective pantsload of “enterprise” computing. Good riddance. But even if we ditched the whole kaboodle that makes the IT department a despised priesthood, I’d still have plenty to do. It’d just be less tiresome googling of inscrutable Microsoft error codes and more interesting projects helping people (who really couldn’t care less about the nuts & bolts of modern computing) get their gear to do neat things that they couldn’t do before. I’m all for that.

As far as kids being computer experts, I think that might’ve been somewhat true from, say, the mid-80s to the mid-90s. Computing has improved so much since then, though, that you don’t need much technical knowledge, and not many people seem inclined to learn more than they have to. Most college students I work with couldn’t tell you the difference between RAM and a hard drive (it’s all “memory”), and most of the interesting conversations I have about computing are with people old enough to remember the command line.

IT departments may change a bit, but I’m not seeing a point in my lifetime where the average company doesn’t need a nerd or two around to unbork the works and digest new technological advancements. It all still runs on computers, and computers fuck up.

DMAN

on 23 Feb 11

As Ricky Gervais says weekly to Carl “Your Talkin Shit!”. I love when really smart people make statements about things they know nothing about.

Embarrassing and ignorant.

Stick to coding…

Hamranhansenhansen

on 23 Feb 11

I do freelance graphics work, and the I-T setup is so bad at most of the places I work that I bring all my own tools. They always let the I-T folks pick the art tools and they almost always pick a DOS box, standard corporate issue. I’m just an artist, but I deploy a better setup out of my knapsack in 5 minutes and get 2-10 times the work done of the in-house artists, just because I have better tools. AppleScript alone doubles my productivity, or more in some cases. So the other artists’ work and even their careers are being ruined by their I-T deploying adding machines instead of art tools.

Noigel

on 23 Feb 11

Full disclosure, I’m currently working in an I.T. department.

IMO your argument loses relevance with the larger the company size… loses more with how much outside governance and regulation the company faces… and loses even more with the more that the ownership is dissemination.

I’ve got tons of problems with how I.T. is ran and how I.T. runs things but being irrelevant? Nope. Becoming irrelevant because of 2.0 and cloud talk? Nope. Having to hang on with unionizing and good ol’ boyish tactics because I’m irrelevant? Nope.

I bust my backside every day. I don’t passively babysit servers. I’ve got tons of people and projects vying for the limited resource of my time… I’d love to have more resources to free myself up.

This article feels written by someone whose been working in a nice Utopian atmosphere. Don’t know whether to be offended or envious. :)

CandleJack

on 23 Feb 11

See, that’s really the beauty of stuff like iPads; some half of the reasons cited above (users installing toolbars, crudware, viruses, etc) are impossible on that platform, by design. It’s like a nintendo, it’s designed so the user can’t screw it up in the glaring and painful ways they currently can hose a generic windows/mac desktop. (Reminder for the kneejerk responses; you can plug a keyboard into an iPad, so you can get real work in the office/email sense done.)

Does that eliminate the need for all IT departments, ever? No. Does that eliminate the need for most of what the average IT department does? Yes.

Huge megacorps, and companies with unusual retention/data policies will need IT departments, but the average business with less than a few hundred employees probably won’t.

PC

on 23 Feb 11

What is the harm in letting users change wallpaper if they don’t change it to something offensive?

Well, because we’re talking about teenagers, who along with being barely literate (in general) also have 0 taste or tact. Add to the fact that these are not their home PCs and that they have a sum total of 0 respect for equipment with no recourse, and you now know why they can’t change wallpapers or install random crap.

Had a teacher complain because another tech deployed a lockdown GPO to the wrong OU. They complained about how we “took over” “their” laptop. I flipped the laptop over, pointed to the Dept sticker. Also noted that no one says they have to keep the laptop and they could give it back any time.

The combination of the “us vs them” attitude and the overt entitlement attitude that is being bred into young and old alike, is actually causing me to seriously question my passion with IT. Seriously getting ready to pick up a hammer and hard hat, which would suit the author just fine no doubt.

We have two IT folk here. They transitioned beautifully. They didn’t want to nurse BAU servers either. What they did instead was find a new fit for their awesome talents. After ditching all our in house services, giving us gmail and purchasing cloud based vendor solutions, they moved on to:

1. creating and maintining build-to-cloud solutions for our dev team.
2. improving our technical skillset around hardware bottlenecks (understand what’s binding up out application etc)
3. Development! One of them part times as our lead IPhone app dev, the other as our lead Android app dev.

Any IT guy worth his salt is worth having around regardless of how the BAU is dealt with. The need doesn’t go away, it’s just deflected from pitifully wasted to truly value-added (JARGON!)

Geof

on 23 Feb 11

I agree with some of the other criticisms, and would add that the article seems to confuse IT with Tech Support. Tech Support (analogous to Geek Squad) accounts for about a fifth of what IT does in my organization (US County Government.). So based on my experience, if you ditch IT who is going to: manage a $2m infrastructure of Cisco switches, VoIP, microwave, fiber links over a several dozen buildings, radio towers, including providing passthrough connectivity and phone service to the local 911 dispatch center; provide scalable customized data infrastructure for the recording of 200 years worth of legal documents (see what a county clerk does); provide custom database and programming to ensure accurate property valuations and taxation for real property (80,000 parcels) as well as other types of property that must by lay be tracked, including all livestock in the county (does gmail have a livestock taxation plugin?); provide e-discovery for lawsuits across all systems, including desktops, within legally mandated timeframes; provide high availability servers for jails who become legally liable if they delay discharge of inmates because the jail management server is down; provide high availability connectivity to the emergency operations center in the event of a natural or manmade disaster.

That is my example, but I bet that any organization with more than 200 employees have specialized systems-industry specific systems-that will never be be replicated by commoditized markets. Sure, we can ditch our email servers for gmail, maybe ditch some of our file servers with something similar. But someone has to manage our network, someone has to manage our industry specific apps. I’ve yet to see an enterprise GL system that could be run without the assistance of a IT department.

Mini-computers didn’t bring down the glass houses, they moved into them, or erected their own. PC and UNIX servers did the same thing. There are changes coming, big ones, but in the end, the pattern just repeats. As the complicated becomes routine, the complicated becomes possible, and the circle starts once more.

Paul

on 24 Feb 11

Pretty naive commentary.
Maybe it’s valid if you work for a needle company and have 20 customers and 20 employees.
When you work at a shop selling mutual funds and you have 7 million customers with all their SSN’s, account balances, addresses, date of birth, bank account numbers, beneficiaries…. Say, $250 Billion.
No. Sorry. You don’t put that on the cloud.
My company here in the US laid off staff and the security guy in the work out room laughed at how many of the people being cut downloaded gigabytes before being led out.
Are IT rules bogus? Yes. Same as TSA rules being there for safety.
Is there a better way to protect data and get things done in IT? I hope so. Instead of denigrating it, come up with a better solution.
That’s the problem with these commentaries: they tear something down without offering a solution.
(And here I am, doing the same thing. Sorry folks.)

MIKE

on 24 Feb 11

DHH, I don’t think you have been around contemporary IT Dept’s. I entered in the IT domain (early 90’s) when it was filled with semi-literate, union-like minded people but that was because there was never a great pool of skilled people around and/or we were forced to just make due with “teach” someone the skills required. Fast-forward to Post 2000’ and things are VERY different. At least in the companies I have worked for. I am currently working for a Fortune 500 company and have been for the last 5 years and let me tell you, NO one comes into our camp without solid credentials, skills and experience. As well, WE DO outsource services and skill that make sense to do like our IVR, eMail, and security. There is a fine balance between what a company needs and what it wants. For me it all starts with like minded individuals who strive to make their workplace a smart and efficient place to work. I would never ever work for a company that never put any trust in their IT management team and a clear vision of what’s systems or services to the companies overall strategy make sense to be kept outsourced or not.

Adam Perlow

on 24 Feb 11

A few quick thoughts:

Many of the comments in this thread that defend IT are basically criticisms.of Windows (clicking on banners, viruses, toolbars, etc). Give people Macbooks and those problems go away.

IT shouldn’t be filtering websites for anything other than pornography (which could cause the workplace to be hostile). People at work have bosses; if people are wasting too much time on Facebook and Twitter, their bosses can address it the same way they deal with people spending too much time goofing off in other ways.

Many of the comments here defending IT really underscore DHH’s point and demonstrate everything that’s wrong with IT. Corporate IT should steal a play out of Apple’s playbook and create internal genius bars. Do you think everyone that drops by the genius bar for some help is savvy? Of course not. But Apple geniuses treat them with respect, not like morons.

To the few people here that actually do spend all day working on routers, microwave communications, big ass switches, etc., DHH wasn’t talking about you, so calm down.

Brock

on 24 Feb 11

Cute article. Unfortunately biased by an environment that may be creating delusions of an IT free utopia by being put of touch with the realities of running a larger business. When you have over 500 staff, 24×7x365 operations, complex business and technology needs not able to be served off the cloud by a one service fits all model. Even much smaller businesses still require highly skilled IT teams to manage technology within the business. I’m not a fan of most IT teams I’ve had to deal with, but I think a big part of the problem is the culture, the constraints put on the IT teams and a lack of understanding. Create a better, more respectful and open environment and perhaps the situation will improve.

Mike

on 24 Feb 11

If this happens as described I think the IT departments will simply follow the servers. Just because a business runs off the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t a server/network/infrastructure somewhere that still needs watching and maintaining. At that point they wouldn’t need to worry about that themselves, but that certainly doesn’t mean no one has to take care of it.

Paul

on 24 Feb 11

—Just an aside for those who think Fortune 500 companies are above doing stupid things: my mutual fund company of $250 Billion seriously thought about shipping all the data to India. It was cheaper. And management was all about the bottom line. It was people in the IT trenches who raised the red flag, not management, not the executives, bot the business end. And it took a lot of waving that red flag to get noticed because the cost savings were so delicious to the people making the decisions who would have profited from them.
Keep an eye on your accounts because the people in charge of maintaining your accounts aren’t in it for you. As Frank Zappa said, “Don’t fool yourself, girl – goin’ right up the poop shute!”

I think your argument is founded on the irrational notion that all IT departments are somehow “at war” with their users.

An effective IT department facilitates what the company needs to do, rather than forcing the company to work according to the IT department’s whims.

In short: your solution is premised on fixing the wrong problem.

Even if that weren’t the case, I imagine that the cloud/web app environment will eradicate IT departments as effectively as home hardware companies eliminated the building industry.

Shaun McDonnell

on 24 Feb 11

I remember people saying this about mainframes and how mainframe operators and programmers would soon be gone and NOW LOOK!

They were absolutely right.

-SM

IT Sufferer

on 24 Feb 11

PC wrote: I flipped the laptop over, pointed to the Dept sticker

Typical heavy-handed IT response. “Do it our way or don’t do it!” You are part of the problem and your days are numbered. Same goes for any IT people who think their job is to keep IT’s job easy by refusing to support anything but a narrow range of products and services define by people who don’t actually have to live by that restriction – with very little regard for what will get people working in a way that actually makes the company money.

PC also wrote: the “us vs them” attitude

Yeah, the one you support and perpetuate!

Thanks must go to to the many truly excellent IT people I have had the pleasure to work with over the years. As a developer I’ve probably always been allowed just a little more freedom from IT policy than most. But I will never ever forget the incompetent inflexible lance corporals I’ve had the misfortune to encounter either. Guess which you are, PC?

Paul

on 24 Feb 11

IBM: The company reported in a statement net income of $3.6bn (£2.3bn), or $2.82 a share, on revenue of $24.3bn, which was up 3 percent from a year ago. Wall Street analysts were expecting earnings of $2.75 a share on revenue of $24.13bn.

So, no Shaun. But you’re correct in that other platforms are huge. But what of it? The data is more important than than the CPU or storage device (which I think is what you were trying to say.) Regardless or whether you code C# or COBOL, the information is the asset. And, unfortunately, the IT dept is ultimately responsible for managing the info.
It’s your grandmother’s money and it has to be protected.
While I rail against the dumb things IT does, I still try to keep that in mind. And I’m game to any good ideas on how to let up on IT’s dumb rules, while still keeping my grandmother’s assets safe. That’s all. I don’t mean to harsh on anyone – I’ve just seen 30 years of stupid stuff and stupid people trying to defend stupid decisions. Consider me jaded, yet open-minded. I believe in the kindness of people, but I lived in Chicago.

Shaun McDonnell

on 24 Feb 11

Paul: I am agreeing with your overall premise for sure which was my point in my post.

I’d like to see the breakdown of IBM’s profit because they are not just a mainframe company anymore. I doubt their mainframe revenue is rising too but I guess I could be wrong.

As an application developer, I have begun to see a good amount of success using the Windows Azure platform to ‘host’ my applications no matter the size of the company.

Furthermore, a recent customer wanted to add Exchange-like functionality to the application I had deployed to Azure.

The solution: Microsoft Exchange Online

Finally, the customer wanted authentication and authorization to the application I had written to be performed using their locally installed Active Directory Server. The solution here was a SAML based authentication using Windows Identity Foundation.

My point is that this was an enterprise-level suite of applications using enterprise-level servers that were completely managed in the ‘cloud’.

I did it all myself. No IT department required.

-SM

Scott

on 24 Feb 11

In the US, you can partly thank Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley for the crippling centralization and bureaucracy of corporate IT departments.

Sam

Not sure what’s news here… Haven’t corporate users been shifting this way since the PC came on the scene in 1981?

Joseph

on 24 Feb 11

If your 20 person company had an IT department, you were doing it wrong in the first place.

PC

on 24 Feb 11

I like how people with a chip on their shoulder magically know people they’ve never met. I’m sorry IT Sufferer that you have someone else tell you what to do at work. It must be hard to live by someone else’s rules and regulations. It fills my heart with sorrow to think that someone else paid for the computer you use every day at work or school and then expects you to only use it for actual work.

“Do it our way or don’t do it” isn’t the IT Dept’s creedo. It’s the boss’ creedo.

billcarroll

on 24 Feb 11

Hahahahahaha! What a joke, and quite frankly a really shitty poke at IT in general.

Most people are too busy downloading music and video at work, or spending their time on Facebook … they can’t even remember their passwords much less get into complex tech issues.

The world runs on Linux and Apache. There is always a job for the talented and hard-working IT person.

Robert Sullivan

on 24 Feb 11

@Nick hits it on the head: “Well run IT should align their departments interests solely with the interests of the business. The person in charge of IT should have a solid business as well as technology mind.”

Too many organizations relegate IT as an item on an expense report – to their own detriment.

I understand what you are saying, but I don’t think that it scales as well as you think. I work for a large retailer in IT and there is no way the average person (even a tech savvy youth) would understand maintaining an Oracle database, or dealing with the God-awful antiquated software most corporations use.

It is an inevitability of course, but I don’t foresee it any time soon at all. As hosted services such as Office 365 and Amazons S3, Azure, etc. gain traction it will slowly take hold. But anyone who works in IT for a large corporation knows that they are the last people to upgrade anything. They are in line after your grandparents…

We have many users who are still on Windows 98 and Office 97. The lucky ones are using Windows XP and Office 2003. Is it any wonder IT people are cranky?

Confused…didn’t your company recently hire the third member of your IT department? Perhaps ask them what it is they do all day?

Jon Drover

on 24 Feb 11

There will always be a need for IT expertise as most issues with IT are between the keyboard and the seat.

Joseph

on 24 Feb 11

Earlier there was a comparison to the extinction of mainframes and how those jobs disappeared. That argument is a bit shortsighted, since the jobs of those mainframes simply moved to other types of systems that are still housed by the organizations that utilized the mainframes. Companies simply went from rooms full of IBM mainframes to rooms full of Dell servers running SAP or Oracle.

I think David’s point stands for small companies, sure. But there are two things to consider: First, the trend is towards outsourcing in all types of areas: payroll, accounting, even inventory and logistics. IT is no different. Secondly, just because people are using iPads and Macs and cloud services doesn’t mean those jobs go away. David acknowledges that, but the point should be made.

And then finally I don’t think that the IT department will be going away for companies of any appreciable size. An organization with thousands of users couldn’t make it without a staff managing their technology—even if all the services were cloud based and run by someone else. Combine that with the fact that a ton of industries have an amazing amount of regulations that they must comply with which implies technical implementation (archiving, reporting, etc) means that IT in its present form will be around for a long long time.

Aaron Breckenridge

on 24 Feb 11

You know, the ones like… “you are only allowed to use IE6 on the corporate desktop”.

I’ve only run into this problem where the company had antiquated systems that use proprietary Microsoft technology from 10 years ago that not even Microsoft supports anymore. From a business standpoint, it’s either spend 2 million to redevelop or just keep forcing people to use IE6 (a solution that already works).

LaughingStalk

on 24 Feb 11

Was this “article” a joke? Because it sure was pretty funny. And a little sad. Sad due to the fact that you, author, seem to so out of touch with reality.

Could you setup “gmail” (I assume you mean business class Google Apps?!) to use IMAP?

Could you explain to your buddy 3 desks over why the email he deleted from his iphone was also deleted from outlook?

Could you setup the iphone to work on your companies wireless network?

Could you setup the iphone to connect to the google apps server?

Could you even get a wireless network up and running for your company?

Could you secure that network?

Could you figure out the difference between your internal wlan being down and there being a problem beyond the demarc?

Steverino

on 24 Feb 11

Adding to LaughingStalk’s post: how about SOX compliance? Who do the SAS70 auditors talk to? When you get sued for not taking proper precautions with: employee data, customer data, vendor data, who proves you DID take proper precautions? When your users or clients or vendors tell you that no way can their records be “offshore”, who’s going to run that “web site” where you magically get all your IT from?

Sprezzatura

on 24 Feb 11

Wow. Anyone who disses Exchange and says Gmail is a viable solution clearly does not work in an office where you need to schedule meetings in conference rooms.

THE killer feature of Exchange is the ability to add resources as well as people to the calendaring system. When your office has 1 floor and maybe 50 people, Gmail and a signup sheet on the conference room door is just fine. Once you’ve got multiple floors of the building, you’ll be screaming for centralized meeting room management.

The question is whether future technology is accelerating faster than people are learning current technology. But I agree that the working population is much more tech-savvy relative to ten years ago – and this statement will probably be true in ten more years.

The demise of the IT department is also a result of developers getting better at making more user-friendly products, take 37signals as an example.

Ata

on 24 Feb 11

So in my company we have a ton of regulatory requirements that, yes, appear to be IT handing down the law. How much to outsource? Our HR department opted to put the entire time keeping and payroll in a national company’s “cloud” and every hourly employee pays for it every day with down servers and tremendous lag time from the remote end. We’ve affirmed this with other companies calling us asking if we see the same issues. Do our employees or even the HR group call this vendor and hold them accountable? NO – they call IT and ask us to fix it. Outsource that, Mr. Webster.

Casey

on 24 Feb 11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nsPE9rxndY

Bob

on 24 Feb 11

Sure, for a 20 person company that doesn’t need anything but OTS apps. But just try it with 2000 pc’s, and a full suite of apps that actually represent the organization’s
core business in a useful way. Not a chance!

jwa

on 24 Feb 11

This is also very in line with Deloitte-Touche tech predicitions for 2010, where they said that people want to make the choices themselves…

A few years ago I might have sided with a lot of the commenters here who say that this article is delusional and out of touch with reality, and even now I can understand the sentiment. People working in the consumer applications space have completely different associations to the term “IT” than people who man a help desk in a company with 10K employees. Or one of the 10K worker bees who comes in Monday morning to find that he can’t connect to the LAN.

But setting aside the provocative title, there’s a good deal of truth in the post. You’re unlikely to see every IT department disappear completely, but it’s totally believable in small companies (it’s already happening) and even larger companies in industries where the ratio of IT spend to revenue is small and requirements are generally for non-specialized, commodity IT services. (Manufacturing comes to mind, certainly there are others.) Even in traditionally IT-heavy domains like finance and telco, there have been pretty drastic changes in the past decade – from insourcing to outsourcing overseen by fewer internal staff, increased use of technology platforms with lower maintenance, SAAS making inroads, etc. And the impression that I have is that the trend is accelerating further, not slowing down, as business units get more pissed off about slow turnaround times and lackluster quality (and lack of understanding) from internal IT staff and CIOs are forced to provide better service at a lower cost while reducing headcount. I don’t think that the business side of things is driving change as much as more traditional IT management concerns right now, but that’s based on my own experiences and may not necessarily be representative of the overall market condition. The thing to understand for all the Exchange admins (who have somehow become the poster children for this argument) out there is this: if the CIO believes that someone outside the company can do your job at the same level of quality, respond quicker to problems (i.e. cause fewer issues to be escalated to management level), and that he can take your salary and benefits off the books, he’ll do it. None of us is a sacred cow.

Henk

on 24 Feb 11

This all seems so logical, that you don’t need an IT-department… until the day a virus sweeps your data away, or you have to pay for all the illegal copies of the software, or someone holds you responsible for coworkors visiting the wrong websites and he/she is ‘forced’ to look at it.

Did I mention backups?

cal

on 24 Feb 11

If businesses had as many gripes with an external vendor, that vendor would’ve been dropped long ago.

defsdoor

on 24 Feb 11

It amuses me when people post saying IT depts are there to keep users in check and to police them. The reality is that IT depts are there to ensure that users can do their jobs more effectively because of the computer and not in spite of it.

The day that more IT staff stop using their admin rights as a shackle and actually start chanting the “I can make your job easier for you” mantra is the day that IT staff will finally become recognised as assets to companies.

Mark G

on 24 Feb 11

You can’t really treat large IT departments as one monotlithic lump. With most of them there is a split right down the middle between the maintainers of the infrastructure (networks, servers, desktop, email etc etc) and the people that develop the corporate software.

It is the former infrastructure group that maintains the vice-like grip what can and can’t be installed. They are at least as frustrating to the development part of IT as they are to the company at large.

Ekcol

on 24 Feb 11

@LaughingStalk:

Can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic. Just in case you’re not and think those things are difficult, the answer is yes to all of them. I can and have done all of those things, and so has everyone in my office, most of whom have no technical background.

Were those supposed to be examples of why we need dedicated IT?

Hank

on 24 Feb 11

Not quite. There is always some kind of lock-in as the business processes are intertwined with IT execution. Going external only means that you are now workuing with a business that is looking to maximize profit by taking advantage of that lock-in.

IT vs User or IT vs Sales of Execs vs IT etc etc. If you don’t have a good bunch of people in your business or you promote segregation between your departments this will always happen.

As for not needing techies in house for small businesses i think all you end up doing is reducing your bill somewhat but still being reliant on outsourced support. At the end of the day techies are there to fight fires and when you exhaust all the options remotely you need people to come in and physically fix your issue. I find it laughable having had experience with my teenage kids that the younger generation or Google Search is going to enable your non techie support staff to pull your butt out of the fire when your approaching a deadline and your computers go down! Being good at social networking or playing a game does not automatically mean you can fix any issue your computer throws at you.

As for making things slow and complicated to provide job security i have seen this in other walks of life. I have heard and experienced developers deliberately making their code complicated or comment sparse in the hope that it makes them more valuable and less redundant when a project comes to an end. Perhaps this is a hangover from a “Job for Life”.

Anyway i commend the author for not writing the in house technical department must die or in house support is dead. Been far to many of “something must die” articles this year lol

Bevelander

@Dan
“End user that hates their older outlook? – might be because management decided to cut that outlook upgrade out of the IT budget. “I’m an exec and I say we don’t need that.”

Company Exec that hates that the company is running on inefficient and dated software? – might be because your end users would require extensive training just to be able to use the new software

IT worker that wishes they could upgrade outlook? – I’ve been meaning to get to that but I need to go remove viruses from someone’s laptop for the 10th time.”

Exactly the type of thing that Is frustrating, I know. ...Have you ever thought that part of these issues are down to the policies and limited range of options that IT tends to limit itself to? What if IT actually looked at more options and what might suit or benefit the workers?

Oh, we just can’t consider other options or software. Why not? You admit they must relearn anyway. What if other office software was more intuitive and consistent and didn’t require employees to relearn everything with each new upgrade? Isn’t that a failing of the current solution? (must be MS).

For example, I hear that IT often dismisses Apple computers and software out of hand: either out of ignorance and perpetuated myths about integration issues; or, by pointing to a policy requring the three vendor approach. Is not MS just ONE OS and software and solutions vendor? Why not supplement MS with other OS’s, other software, other solutions or web services that might actually benefit your company’s goals? Because IT are entrenched and unable to look beyond their narrowness. You seem to prove the point.

All three of the objections you raised display the precise IT attitudes that the article is talking about. Of course a 20 (or even 100) person outfit doesn’t require an IT department, if the tools and services are chosen with care.

Larger ones that do can certainly make an effort to explore better options for many of the products and services they supply; options which would require less intense support and, provably, improve employee productivity and job satisfaction.

That’s true in the future. But now it’s only for a limited number of small companies where there’s enough tech’y people.

For huge bureaucratic monsters that won’t work I guess. They can’t allow itself to be effective and modern.

Steve

on 24 Feb 11

You couldn’t be more wrong. People think that they can get away with the little knowledge (and huge ignorance) that they possess, and for some, they get away with it for a long time. But many are disasters waiting to happen, time and time again. I don’t have a problem with you outsourcing IT to the best value vendor, but you are deluding yourself if you believe that people no longer need support and guidance – even if the latter is seen as “no, you can’t have that!”

Mike

on 24 Feb 11

The need for IT is on the rise

The need for uninformed journalism is on the decline

FTFY

Lisa Morgan

on 24 Feb 11

The statement was made:

“But all young people “get” today’s IT. I don’t think that is true any more than it has been in the past. Getting how to use IT to support a business strategy is vastly different than using Facebook to connect with your friends.”

This is well said and entirely true! As an IT person (developer) my strengths lie not in getting the tech but in understanding how to apply it to achieve my company’s core business. We all have to become a little more BSA and a little less server-sitter to stay valuable.

is this a joke?

on 24 Feb 11

We host all the source code for our applications internally for obvious security reasons.

is this a joke?

on 24 Feb 11

no quotes in comments i see… half the comment eaten, well done!

the irony of this post coming from the dudes that won’t put their private repositories on github is too much

as mentioned… We host all the source code for our applications internally for obvious security reasons.

I’ve seen similar shifts in enterprises that have chosen to outsource non-core parts of their operation. This is normally a great idea, but does require a new skillset for the enterprise – that of contract management. To shift from being a company with a large emphasis on IT operations, to one which needs to manage the commercial issues around having someone else do that for you can be challenging.

Daniel Bingamon

on 24 Feb 11

I’ve always hated the term IT. I’ve been into computers since the 1980 and the IT term is a more recent usage.

To many of programmers, the IT term is like people trying to call a cabinet-maker a carpenter. There is a strong difference between the two.

BenHill123

on 24 Feb 11

IT departments are going to be around even if say everyday moves to the cloud. You still need an IT department, if your pC or notebook or Laptop or IPad goes down, who are you going to call ?

Ferenc Attila Zoltan

on 24 Feb 11

Every now and then, this trend pops up: move to the cloud, decentralise, outsource, get rid of it. And then it just goes away.

The only thing that usually comes out of it, is about a terrabyte of articles that predict the death of the in-house IT department. Well, you gotta have trendy content, don’t you?

Make it simple: until userus stupidus is alive and well, then the need and value of in-house IT is alive and well.

I spent some of yesterday being annoyed about this post, mostly because of the sniping at IT guys. But, you know, not worth it. It’s just a marketing post. 37 Signals sells web applications; they want you to use web applications; it is in their best interests to convince you that you don’t need an IT department because web applications are the wave of the future. This post simply reflects the 37 Signals corporate direction.

Or put more simply: YHBT; HTH.

shuffler

on 24 Feb 11

Outsourcing and outstructuring the whole IT dept reduces the ability to customize, change scope on a project, correct a mistake in determining needs, walk up to a person in the company and get IT advice, and is usually contract-bound to a set of defined services. It is also less secure. It makes as much sense as getting rid of the accounting department. It does make sense to outsource and heed for the cloud for some services and projects, but the IT dept going away? Nope.

Laughable rubbish

on 24 Feb 11

Is This A Joke’s comment spells out the pathetic nature of this article. 37 Signals “host all the source code for our applications internally for obvious security reasons”.

So without an IT department who ‘owns’ your security policy, who looks after your backups, who administers your network, who doles out your user accounts and all the rest of it.

An IT department isn’t just about replacing laptops – its about ensuring the survival of organizations in this joined up age. Even if you got rid of everyone in your IT department you would still have to allocate the roles they performed to someone!

Idiot.

Philos

on 24 Feb 11

It’s easy to take egregious examples of idiocy and make them straw men to ignite. This not only lays a long line of link bait, it makes thinking unnecessary. True, there are IT idiots like there are union idiots. But going to a model where whatever happens happens is inviting a race to the bottom. Oh, I forgot, that’s where we are headed anyway.

MIkey

on 24 Feb 11

Seriously? You’re assuming a 20-man office needs an IT person to run a “server.” You glossed over or missed entirely the many reasons why the IT department has trouble meeting expectations.

I think your overall point is well taken…that IT departments need to be more service oriented. But getting rid of the IT department isn’t going to happen for most companies. Maybe you’ll downsize it but get rid of it entirely? Those who can successfully outsource their IT support probably didn’t need it to begin with (their technology needs aren’t very complex). But try to get Sally, who was hired to do accounting, to contact your e-mail vendor to figure out why the eFax service isn’t working and you’ll soon have her on your doorstep asking for more money or whining about “that’s not what I was hired for.” All while her accounting work is falling behind. Is that your idea of a solution?

My point is, if you have an IT department now you probably have technology maintenance and support needs that can’t be entirely handled by outsourcing without impacting your business is some negative way. You’ll likely be throwing out the baby with the bath water by outsourcing your entire IT department.

Why did I waste my time posting this?

janey

on 24 Feb 11

Considering how many times I see people clicking in the Internet Explorer search field (using Bing) to SEARCH FOR GOOGLE, I think that this article might be true in some cases, but not all. Especially not as an organization grows.
Also consider the complete lack of support that many small organizations have experienced from Google, and all those hosted apps don’t look so great. And what about when the internet connection goes down or desktops are malfunctioning? Some “IT department” gets a phone call, even if it winds up being a call to Geek Squad – some “IT guy” is going to wind up fixing it.

Clark

on 24 Feb 11

People saying Mac / Ipad is the answer are completely clueless. First off you all do know that Mac is regarded by IT as a laughing stock when it comes to security. For the couple of ignorant people who say Ipad is the answer, (I’m not going to laugh at you), I’m just going to say, look into why Israel (yes the entire country) has banned Ipads.

Scott

on 24 Feb 11

What are the “obvious security reasons” that you don’t practice your own preaching and host source code outside of your company? Why is your source code any more important to your business operation than a restaurant’s recipes or an investment firm’s internal research reports?

My problem with IT is the one size fits all attitude. I used to do Modeling & Simulation development for an engineering firm. We did lots of rapid prototyping, and were constantly using and evaluating new hardware and software. Yet the IT department insisted on treating us like any other user (who mainly needed MS Office and email to work). We had to fight tooth and nail to get admin access to our own lab machines even though they were not on the company network. Every software install was a battle (or a looong wait). They practically had a stroke when we asked for a Mac computer for our lab.

We knew far more about how to install, maintain and troubleshoot our own systems then the generalist IT staff did. Often the only reason we would call an IT person is so they could log in with their admin password and allow us to do our install/change/fix!

Does that mean I think they were useless? No. But they needed to understand that different users have different needs, and that experienced software engineers don’t need all the babysitting.

Either
1.) 37signals is not doing these things or
2.) David is just playing semantics by not labeling the people that do them his “IT department”.

Of course #1 is not true, so whether an “IT department” or a “team”, it’s just the same. Beyond a marketing piece, this article is pointless.

Dave

on 24 Feb 11

Wow, got an ax to grind , do we? I’ve been in IT for 17 years. I work for a engineering company with users that tend to be quite computer savvy.

There are, of course, rules. If you communicate their purpose to the users, they have no problem abiding by them. If you can’t come up with a reasonable explanation for a policy, maybe it isn’t reasonable to begin with. Make intelligent policies and treat your users like they aren’t 4 year old witless morons out to destroy your network and they will respect you. It’s not rocket science. I use the analogy that if they are the rock stars, we’re the roadies. Can’t put on a show without both.

I spend most of my time writing custom apps to enhance the business process. My co-workers outside of IT view me a member of their team. They come to me with a problem, I give them a solution. If you have an IT department like the one this article descibes, you need to hire better people.

Funny

on 24 Feb 11

About this time next year David or Jason will be posting an introduction to their newly hired IT Department manager.

I sincerely hope that the new users are smarter than the current ones.

I work in an IT Department and the thing that discourages me the most is that some users (young and old) do not want to learn how to use their work tools. If they use computers for their daily work I guess that they can achieve more in their work by learning how to use their tools effectively.

Glenn

on 24 Feb 11

Technology may be a commodity, but the ability to execute is not.

Scott

on 24 Feb 11

@David: How do you reconcile this “Today you can get just about all the services that previously required local expertise from a web site somewhere” with your previous advice to do everything yourself locally before having someone else do it?

Previously you’ve said “never hire anyone for something you haven’t first struggled to do on your own.”

Simon

on 24 Feb 11

It’s entirely possible to run a 20-man office …

Carl Olson

on 24 Feb 11

@Sprezzatura “Wow. Anyone who disses Exchange and says Gmail is a viable solution clearly does not work in an office where you need to schedule meetings in conference rooms… Once you’ve got multiple floors of the building, you’ll be screaming for centralized meeting room management.”

James Lanning

on 24 Feb 11

IT Departments will never go away. They will certain change; they will become more lightweight, agile, and their purpose will be more about improving business process and adding to a company’s profitability than just “keeping the boat afloat”. I am the only IT staff at a small (50ish-user) medical facility, and the opportunities for using technology to improve the business is very high right now.

Without dedicated, professional technology staff of some kind, businesses will fall behind. The only other option is to throw money at consultants and vendors, whose goal is not to improve your business – it’s to improve their business.

Mike

on 24 Feb 11

This prophecy is oddly self-serving coming from the perspective of an application development/hosting company.

I understand the sentiment, but I think you’re limited in your understanding of what IT does. IT (as a generality) is decidedly more complex than simply tech support or babysitting servers. IT does not generally “see itself” as a cost center rather than a business enabler, IT is relegated to that role by business leadership and is rarely given a seat at the table to contribute on a strategic level. The issue at hand isn’t a growing irrelevance of IT, it’s in the ever-increasing need for stronger IT/Business alignment so that technology can be used as a catalyst to grow the business. IT professionals need to be experts in technology (both current and future) as well as in the business specifics of whatever industry they may be a part of. In my 10+ year career in IT, I have yet to work for an organization that actively promotes this type of symbiosis. If IT is becoming irrelevant, it’s because the business has made it an afterthought.

john

on 24 Feb 11

Any IT “professional” who thinks that Exchange is a good solution to anything ought to be fired. And if you’re really unable to support Ubuntu or Macs, why are you in IT?

I’ve seen some terrible IT departments. One of our partners is still, to this day, forcing all employees to use Windows 2000 and IE6. I am not exaggerating.

So it’s easy to make fun of them and point out how out-of-touch they are and wonder what they are doing with their time.

The reality of the situation is that IT is not deprecated, there are just some poorly run departments whose managers or corporate officers are not interested in reforming. This is no different than any other department at any other company in any other discipline. You find some bad apples, but most are running pretty smoothly.

How on earth is a (larger than a handful of employees) company going to function without IT support? You need to get it from somewhere. You either have an in-house department, a contracted department, or disparate sources of support from various vendors, but it’s there. That’s the most obtuse hyperbolic projection I’ve seen in a long time. It clearly shows the author’s ignorance of what is involved in supporting a company’s technology.

Speaking of hyperbole, two people baby sitting Exchange? Really? I spend about an hour a week on Exchange, and 99% of that is just making changes to mailboxes (adding, removing, changing limits, alternate email addresses, etc.). Exchange is just about the most stable server product I have ever used.

Google apps makes sense for a lot of people—I’m not detracting from that. But there’s no need to lie about Exchange administration to boost a cloud product. The cost of hardware, power, and licensing alone makes it a barrier for entry to any small company.

A lot of people here, the author included, are making very broad generalizations about whole populations, based upon their personal experiences. Many arguments being made here sound as though they’re coming from inside very small bubbles. That’s just sloppy, partisan thinking.

This issue covers a spectrum of use cases, not a finite pair of categories that can be defined by simplistic dogma.

I’m glad there’s a trend towards simplifying the functionality of what it takes to run a business. And I’d love to work for one of those smaller companies where everyone is competent and smart about computer use, but I’ve spent far more time at larger corporations where staff (hired by compartmentalized HR procedures) is far more likely to include careless, undereducated, infantilized products of our crippled public education system. If you want a generalization about a population, have a look at national reading scores over the past three decades.

Think those big business are on the way out? I wish I could find smaller, smarter replacements for the ones that handle my banking, credit, insurance, groceries, housewares, and utilities. Could someone let me know when that’ll be possible?

It only takes one dissociative fool to infect his or her work computer with malware and bring a business’s operations to a crawl, whether by careless surfing or by transferring “harmless” personal files from home. Supposedly smart folks who mess with bandwidth and security need to be guarded against, too. If you work in a place where this isn’t an issue, you have my serious envy.

I rely on good IT departments to tell me what I can do on equipment that’s not my own and to maintain their systems well enough to allow me to do it. I avoid bad IT departments when I can.

Albert

on 24 Feb 11

you use exchange for example, what about Linux servers?
I would like to see a simple hr guy set or a domain or a backup server

on the use of Gmail, it is a good service, but gmail will make backups of your email?

And if you let the Internet open to all office employees would I’m sure 80% of the day on the Internet, and all the PC full of viruses

as Mike says, you do not understand what it is about

Fledder

on 24 Feb 11

I think this is only true for smaller companies where you indeed mostly need services you can get from the cloud: email, doc mgt, simple project management, etc.

I work in a company with a total of 20,000 applications. We stopped counting after that. Various of these systems share data, and they need an integral approach. We also acquire a lot of smaller companies that need to be integrated. You cannot let end users or savvy users order their own IT as a service, it is how we got to that steaming pile of 20,000 apps in the first place.

So I think the bigger the scale and dependencies, the stronger the need for an internal department for the sake of governance and architecture. At the very least you allways need a service manager.

Please realize that not all companies solely use simple collaboration tools.

Rod

on 24 Feb 11

Written by someone who has never worked on the IT side of business. We, in IT, would love to allow end users more room to do what they need but in my experience there are a few things holding them back:

1) End users don’t always know what they want or need and frequently don’t know how to find it. I wish more end users would take the initiative to work with IT to find solutions for them but for many, they think that IT should just supply the answer. Then when they don’t like the solution that IT sourced, they gripe about not being involved.
2) When they have a problem, they frequently can’t figure out what it is and have no clue how to resolve it.
3) Tech savvy end users may be great at ‘using’ but usually need someone else’s expertise to get them ready to ‘use’. This applies to IT people too. I know programmers who couldn’t diagnose a network issue if their life depended on it.

I could go on but the need for IT departments is not going to disappear any more than accounting departments and anyone who thinks so is just kidding themselves.

me

on 24 Feb 11

We are in another cycle of “Let’s outsource IT and save a bunch of money!”. The only problem is that the people making these decisions weren’t around the last time this was tried and it failed (anyone remember service bureaus in the 70’s and 80’s). Also, the people making these decisions don’t have the technical qualifications to do so intelligently.

My company just went from an in-house payroll to 3rd party software, with that decision/contract made by a non-IT person. The “I told you so’s” came soon after implementation, and so did the invoices for the options/changes they needed. And the 2 hour callback for problems is only to acknowledge the problem, not to fix it. I am waiting for the first missed payroll, so I can just sit back and smile.

History repeats itself, because no one making decisions remembers past failures.

Jerry Smith

on 24 Feb 11

Anyone can write an article on “The end of the _ Department.”

It’s all nonsense. It will simply be a migration of IT from 1 (or more) at every office to collections of them at repair centers/data centers etc.

But I forgot, it’s cool to announce the end of things.

Concerned

on 24 Feb 11

“the people making these decisions weren’t around the last time this was tried” <- spot on. I find myself thinking this on a recurring basis of ideas posted here.

37signals never acknowledges the decades of IT industry and software work that came before them. Thirty-plus years of problem-solving patterns, best-practices, and industry experience are disregarded as ideas presented here are erroneously presented as either a good idea or a novel design concept.

That’s certainly 37signals’ right. But as 37signals’ influence over the next generation of software professionals grows, it is a huge diservice to the software profession. svn continues to completely discount all those who came before them to the detriment of those new to the industry bound to waste effort and time either re-creating what already exists or going down the same dead-ends that others have discovered years before.

If the newest generation of software professionals follow this pattern, it would only slow industry progress as the same lessons have to be relearned from scratch vs. building on those that came before.

LaughingStalk

on 24 Feb 11

Many advocates of getting rid of a dedicated IT department (be it one person or 1000 people) keep talking about “the cloud”.

So tell me, what happens when you can’t reach the cloud for some reason? Maybe your internet goes out, or maybe there’s a problem with authentication and you can’t log in. What happens when it takes 12+ hours to resolve the issue and your only contact with support is via email that you can’t use because your internet is down?

People who believe everything should be moved to the cloud should go talk to some people who have had problems and ask how long it took to get the issues resolved, how much it cost them, what the down time was, etc, etc, etc.

There’s a reason in house IT isn’t going anywhere

Jim S.

on 24 Feb 11

I don’t even know where to start. Seeing an article like this is always upsetting, but at the same time they explain why we as IT people have so many problems getting buy-in when changes need to be made, or protections need to be implemented or money needs to be spent.

I’ve been in IT for about 16 years, and I’ve seen these arguments come and go. The complexity of even a medium sized business’ IT department would boggle most people’s minds if they knew everything that goes into it.

I currently work at a company where we have ~200 employees. To support these people we run the following with 4 people:

= 2 physical sites in the US, 1 in Europe

= ~55 servers (We’re in the middle of virtualizing.)

= 25 remote users who need flexible support based on where they are at any given time.

= Several other non-web applications that are critical for serving our customers

= Exchange server system for both US sites (with failover replication) and Web access for travelers and our EU site.

= SAN disk storage(with snapshots and failovers)

= Virtual Servers (with failovers)

= WAN links between sites (which we have to make work with less bandwidth than would be required because the suits want instant and fast performance but aren’t willing to pay for it).

Not to mention training users, writing policies and procedures, supporting regular desktop and laptop computers, MS Office, flight booking software, mainframe connectivity to vendors, VPN access for our users, filtering to keep idiots from surfing porn at work, printing, faxing (both fax machines and a fax server) Antivirus, mail archiving, backups, network and file system security and design, UPS system, Blackberry server, routers, switches, firewalls, new systems that departments need NOW, ... it goes on. If you think for a moment that ANY of these systems are unnecessary or inconsequential, just let there be a 5 second hiccup in ANY of them. The phone rings off the hook.

Along with all of this, we keep all these systems patched, updated, improved, documented (or try to keep up… we’re constantly changing anytime leadership has a whim), ensure that we’re HIPAA, SAS70 and ISO compliant, fixing hardware failures, software that is poorly written by lazy programmers that can’t figure out how to get their app installed without giving every mouthbreather with a keyboard full admin rights to their desktop. The same users that say “I didn’t do anything!!!” when logs show otherwise.

I’m certain there’s stuff that I haven’t included. If you haven’t worked in IT, you really have no idea what you’re talking about. If I seem angry, it’s because I’m sick of working incredibly hard while hearing how unnecessary I am all the time… until stuff breaks.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the folks I support. I LOVE my job. It’s not an easy one by any stretch, and to be completely honest, not everyone is capable, despite how pervasive technology is today. Or will be tomorrow.

Jason

B Parker

Reading all the comments above, it looks like there is a large consensus that yet again, 37Signals is blowing it’s own trumpet with no idea how to play a tune!

“the cloud” certainly has it’s place, as does blog based marketing, but does anybody really take this companies blog seriously anymore?

There was a time 37Signals was something to aspire to, now it just seems to think it can talk, and the masses will do what they are told…

But what do i know, given their income there must be a good number of sheep in the world!

RNM

on 24 Feb 11

I, like others, think DHH is confusing IT and help desk. IT provides infrastructure that in SOME companies can be SOMEWHAT relegated to the cloud and easy systems like GDocs, etc. but not for all companies, probably ever. Many companies (even small ones, but not all big ones) need much more security than others. In college I interned at a large chemical company that had major major IT security controls in place because of intellectual property issues. Having tech savvy people doesn’t mean there’s not human error or prevent people from getting viruses that can compromise systems. Joe in the next cubicle can’t fix that kind of a problem just because he’s tech savvy. But there are tons more reasons besides IP that companies would need stronger security measures or controls or infrastructure. That will never go away. IT might shift away from needing to provide help desk assistance IN ADDITION to everything else they do, but to say it’s the end of the IT department because people are tech savvy is silly.

Further, if we just limit the discussion to help desks, to say that we don’t need help desks because everyone is tech savvy now is like saying the baby boomer generation could all be tv repairmen because they understood television more than their previous generation.

I work at an internet company which is comprised mostly of 24-30 year olds. Most of them can surf the web like no one’s business, but don’t have good concepts beyond that. If they were asked to do anything technical outside of use Firefox and do stuff in gmail/gdocs, 75% of them would probably stare blankly.

CViescas

on 24 Feb 11

Had to modify my initial post, since Jim S Nailed much of it ;-) (Excellent post too Jim ! )

There are a couple more points though that were missed. There is hardly a day that goes by, where someone has a “pet project” that needs to get done ASAP, and because of the “on salary” concept it is usually viewed as “free” . However the true COST of that project is many times the “slow and ‘US Postal’ service” fall out.

Having seen first hand IT departments that were slow and buried in the corporate muck.. I realize there is some truth to the “safe and secure” mentality many IT depts. have.

However, those of us dedicated to making things better and supporting our users and systems, realize that IT is really an impossible task that we maintain IT at a usually under funded and near out of controlled level.

Some businesses can rightfully run with contracted – outside IT, and in many cases it is cheaper and far better. However, there are also many businesses that MUST have that internal support, and some that benefit from BOTH.

I have been a consultant since 1989, providing IT support both in-house and as well as “As Needed” / contracting. And until you live in that world and realize what it really is… you have no clue.

C

Tetra

on 24 Feb 11

This article is embarrassing and misguided on so many levels, and its supporters as well. Even as someone who doesn’t work in IT, but works in the technology department, I get to witness daily what young and old employees alike are able to muss up. Our two IT guys are constantly running around an office of 80, and anyone who seriously mentioned Google mail or the cloud as some sort of magical fix to these woes is sorely mistaken.

Vendors love trying to sell this stuff to you because people – like you and some of these readers – lap it up, but good luck trying to get any support for those products in a timely manner. And by timely, I mean at all in most cases.

Easier sold than supported, especially considering the idea of the cloud is vastly exaggerated compared to what is actually capable right here, right now.

Anonymous Coward

on 24 Feb 11

I don’t think this is relevant. Even though services can be “outsource”. For worker repairing his/her own computer will be time consumption, and time is money. Thats why we have I.T. personnel. Its a simple fact if there are still computer in the world we gonna need IT technician. Lets look at it another way, medical information are now available on the net. We can go on the internet and enter in our symptoms and be medically diagnose. So what are you saying do we need doctors?

Cron

on 24 Feb 11

I have worked DOS, Win 3.1-3.11, Win95, Win98 -ME, Win2000, WinXP, Win Vista, Win7. Not to mention all the Server Operating Systems that mirror those personal OS’s. I have had to learn how to support and configure each system before users started to have intellegent problems or questions. I remember Plug and Play was going to make my job obsolete – I now know Plug and Pray. I know I can Google any problem and come up with 3,000,000 hits – out of 10 solutions 9 will be from crackpots, it is hard to glean the good stuff, so good luck Google! Usually the learning curve on software is a little steep so I read constantly – once in a while for pleasure. I know jobs are being sent to India – I am just glad I can unhook a server or monitor and move it to another location – I would like to see India’s tech support do that. Oh yeah they can tell you how to do it – my conversation with them usually goes “What was that?” “What?” “What did you say?” – Might take a week to move that monitor. And the terms they use “Looks like your TCPIP Stack was unable to access the LAN – Translation Usually – BROKEN WIRE. I sometimes wish I had a job to weave baskets underwater, but until that becomes a viable job I will keep doing IT. Who knows I might even be the outside help you are outsourcing to, but I have no Illusions towards my job – as long as there is Information there also will be Technology. I hope you are qualified.

SteveS

on 24 Feb 11

I’m not sure who is dumber… the person who wrote this article or the naive dolts who actually thinks there’s any merit to this discussion.

For starters, talking about a 20+ person company is much different than talking about a 2000+ person company. Small, privately held companies have never needed an IT department. All they ever needed was a few people that are even “somewhat” technical in nature. Now, when you talk about larger, publicly held companies that have to deal with various types of compliance such as SOX, etc. You understand that you need controls in place and segregation of duties, etc. You also can’t outsource everything. You can outsource bits and pieces, but these various systems need to interface with each other and they don’t. Many companies needs customizations to their services in order to accommodate things like unions, etc. that simply cannot be handled by SaaS (software as a service) based companies because customizations defeats their business model.

Again, this article was written by a naive dolt that works for a small company and is apparently bitter about poor service from his IT department. Boo-hoo… However, I’ve read nothing from this diatribe that would even come close to addressing the needs of any medium to large size corporation.

A couple years ago I worked for an engineering services company with about 50 employees. Their IT staff consisted of one person who kept an eye on the network part-time. Their approach to IT was very open; let the employees maintain their own computers; let them take their laptops home for personal use in off hours; more knowledgeable employees help their less knowledgeable colleagues with computer problems; everybody learns.

Michael

on 24 Feb 11

I agree with a lot of this post, and have worked in companies that defined the concept of “IT-Hell” in the past – but the other side of the coin is just as – if not more – important.

Many, if not most, “knowledge workers” are completely incompetent with their computers, and equally irresponsible. Instead of being viewed as essential tools – as essential as, say, writing or basic arithmetic – companies have very low requirements and expectations vis-a-vis their employees’ ability to use their machines and the software on them.

Facility with computers is no longer a nice add-on to “the important skills” an employee has – it is an important skill – an essential skill – in its own right. Being able to do complex analysis but having no spoken or written language to communicate is useless – likewise in the current environment, so is being able to do almost any business task without the facility with computers to keep the thing running yourself.

I put the onus on management to insist on a higher degree of facility with tech in their businesses – and if it’s not there, to take steps to remediate.

In my case it took me 2 of my 5 years at one company in particular to lobby for and get an “IT department build” of the standard laptop – but when I did, my productivity skyrocketed. I was suddenly free to use the tools that I needed. The IT folks were skeptical, but after a couple of months they were very happy – one less bitchy user asking for more stuff!

Yorkville

on 24 Feb 11

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ALIT

on 24 Feb 11

The author is obviously ignorant of the complexity involved in any IT operation supporting an organization larger than about 30 employees.

Also, to suggest that any company should trust its proprietary intellectual property to “the cloud” is just plain dangerous.

Jean D

on 24 Feb 11

At the end of the day one has to ask himself, for a customer, what value the IT department is adding to the goods purchased. The answer is very little or i would say similar to the electricity of the building. Does it improve end product design(sorry I can install my own CAD), does it bring new product technology the market? The IT department has indeed facilitate all this but at what cost? Well, much more than the electricity bill for sure. A wave of used car salesman invaded the sales department of all big firms not to name any and here we bill again. I have been in this IT business for 2 decades and I have seen all these improvised experts try to meddle with the business process of companies to disastrous effects. Hey have people forgot that the likes of industrial engineers are qualify to do this not you ?? Knowing how to configure ms word does not qualify you for revamping the corporate procurement process !! I have seen people calling themselves anything with architect at the end. What a joke. As if configuring an exchange server had something to do with art !! We currently have 7 architects at my client and in the last year the value added to our clients is next to none. In fact it has been negative because their choice of technology have been driven by flavour of the day or by whatever gartner says and not driven by the business vision. Happpy to see that IT and oil is comming to an end. The world will be ever better. How about getting yourself a real job and do something significant instead.

Cron

on 24 Feb 11

I am IT, I do not do bookkeeping I support the people who do. I am not an electrician but I support him also. I am no better than these people we just have different areas of expertise. If the bookkeepers PC caught a virus, lost the Hard Drive, had Defective RAM – She calls me. I have a load of work that I have to prioritize, your work, my work, maintenance, etc. Now the Bookkeeper just moved to the top of my list. She needs to get her job done for business continuity and I am the person that can get her back running. I do not need to know accounting, or how much electricity I will use to fix her problem (s). She could just say “to heck with it I am going home”- I could just buy another computer that does not have a problem and put it at her desk - is that my job? OOPS the CEO’s PC just burped, needed a reboot- I have explained reboots many times before – but he does sign my check. I look for these intellegent users in our organization and would plead for their help. Go Figure, they are busy doing their Graphic Arts making Signage for the company, cant help now. Although they may install autocad on their own, it conflicted with the Cleint Access program we all use and now parts of the PC just don’t work. Go Figure. PC’s are easy – don’t let anyone fool you. You dont need to be smart to work in IT alot of bums obviously do it, just like you don’t need to be smart to be a bookkeeper. I know I don’t feel so smart when I don’t have “all” the answers, but I can fix the problem.

norC

Harry the Hound

Dear reader,
thanx for the strong argument and the excellent ensuing debate.

Perhaps we need to turn IT into profit centres (if the systems can cope) and have good, transparent metrices. Then management will soon fix inefficiencies.

Otherwise complexity means more people, more systems, more managers, more promotions, more contracts, more bribes… Without transparent KPI’s this is bound to happen.

Then there’s also the issue of IT vs IS. Should IT become a utility and IS distributed among the other departments ?

Thank you

Duke Nukem

on 24 Feb 11

TAKE THIS ARTICLE WITH A GRAIN OF SALT. Read it carefully, if your are a 1 to “20 man office” this article is meant for you. It is not meant for Large Industry, Governments(Federal, State or local), medinum size businesses or offices over 20 employees. It does not address HIPPA, Sarbanes/Oxley or any other Federal Requirement. READER BEWARE!

Norman

on 24 Feb 11

NO we should pay our CEO’s more money, and maybe in gold since cash so variable.

Federico Deis

on 24 Feb 11

So who’s to blame. As for what I see on the most comments, IT departments bolted on Windows are the most closed and stagnant. Go and visit IT departments in charge of Macs or Linux and that’s not always the case.

reduke to notem

on 24 Feb 11

to apply those regulations in the workplace, you need to get the certification. All this is made at restricting supply and price these services above normal value. Those regulations did nothing to stop the subprime.

I run a company that makes software for IT Departments. When I first read this article, I found myself agreeing with it.

But hang on a sec, my livelihood depends on IT Departments existing and needing the software I write.

How is it this article is resounding with me yet I pour hours upon hours into building software for IT Departments.

After some soul searching I realized that this article resounds with me because I agree that there is change occurring. I’ve worked in jobs where I have brought my own Mac and iPhone rather than rely on the IT Department. And I’ve seen SaaS applications successfully deployed and adored without the involvement of the IT Department.

But that doesn’t mean there is an end of the IT Department, or the end of the line for IT Professionals.

My thoughts, as an IT Professional and someone who makes a living out of IT Departments, on what the changes DHH observes mean for IT Professionals and especially Mac IT professionals:

Brian

on 24 Feb 11

I disagree. Just because some people can manage their own IT doesn’t mean they will or should. I’ve made many a website for small businesses with content management so they can do their own updates, but they still came back to IT to do it because they either didn’t have the time or inclination to do it themselves. And that’s fair enough, as someone earlier said people should stick to their core business strength and leave IT to people who enjoy it and can do it in half the time. And it keeps me employed :)

jon

on 24 Feb 11

The companies who feel they can do without an official IT department are growing in number and size

jon

on 24 Feb 11

The companies who feel they can do without an official IT department are growing in number and size – please provide a source for this quote

Ferenc Attila Zoltan

on 24 Feb 11

The need for an in-house IT department/person varies wildly based on the type of business and even more on the types of people that business has as employees.

In my humble opinion, any business that has grown beyond a 20+ person limit, should start looking into getting someone on staff that can provide support.

37Signals is obviously trying to scare up some business for itself (some suit is probably reading this piece right now, thinking @finally, I’ll get rid of the IT staff and look good to the upper management), unfortunately, in-house IT is here to stay. Any business that has work to do and not just dick around offering opinions about something, will have the need for in house IT staff/person, because it just won’t have the time to wait for some far-away outfit to show up.

Scott

on 25 Feb 11

“they always talk about the things they’re not allowed to do, the applications they can’t run, and the long time it takes to get anything done.” – please provide a source for this as well.

From the comments on this article, it obvious that when people talk about IT departments, they talk about a lot of things besides what you purport they always talk about.

Maybe you’re listening to the wrong people or the people you hear always talking about these things have crappy IT departments.

alpha

on 25 Feb 11

Believe me there is someone somewhere that is looking at what it takes to wipe you out of your business. They did it with lot’s of coding sent to india for lot less money. They will not stop there. Profit is profit and you must get out of the way. Soon enough, we will just talk to computers and it will do what we ask. You have to realize that we are in a winner takes all society. Make you money now and save it because you will be left dry in 10 years.

Alberto

on 25 Feb 11

Funny how “IT Department” becomes the “they” in conversations. It is easy to displace the challenges to someone else. In reality, everyone needs an IT department. Even households, someone has to take the responsibility to deal with the crap that no one wants to deal with when some service is not running.

The good news is that IT is much easier to deal with nowadays. You just need good people that get open source and inexpensive, common sense tools. Too bad more companies do not capitalize on the open source, straight forward alternatives to deal with IT so that it is not as much of an issue.

I think IT Departments will always exist; hopefully more and more new companies will start it with common sense, cost effective toolsets, and IT will not be as much of a conversation topic anymore.

I feel that this article is a bit out of touch with the reality of the IT department.

An IT department within a corporation is much more than the servicedesk and emails. It’s about information systems that will drive their competitive advantage. Systems that are designed and customized according to the company’s processes. That may be in the cloud (or very often outsourced) but would still require IT/IS people to maintain them, make them evolve.

If we get down to the service desk and email, you may for sure use lot of cloud solutions for communications, security and much more, but you’d still require an internal force in order to aggregate this. What you’re describing may work well for few SMEs, but as soon as you’re having more than a few hundred people, it does not work.

Why do you have to force standard ? To ensure that everyone has the same access to applications and do not face issues.

Few examples:
- Many solutions would not work with any browser. They might work well with IE, Firefox, but not with Chrome or Opera. So you’d let the guy fight trying to work around it alone ? Not sure that helps the productivity, especially if your customer is waiting a sales order
- Remember when Office 2007 was issue and all bunch of people still running 2003 were receiving .docx documents that they could not open ?

IT departments are evolving, and evolving with the new technologies, new platforms. Their base role is changing from bare basic services to managing and provisionning the platforms in the cloud. They’re also there to create innovation, and that’s the success story of many companies. It is also the failure of many others who still considered IT as a cost center instead of a profit center, and did not include them within their strategy. Especially as IT is now at the center of every business.

On the long term, I do not see a disappearance of IT, but only a shift within the organization and responsibilities.

David Rettig

on 25 Feb 11

I tend to agree that a small 20 man shop (as discussed by the author) could manage without a dedicated IT staff.

I manage the IT department for a midsize manufacturing concern. We have 5 locations, 500 employees, 400+ workstations, 50+ servers, etc and get by with 3 IT (support) guys (excluding developers).

So if I cut that down to 1 location with 20 staff members, could I do it with no formal IT department? Easy.

Alberto

on 25 Feb 11

The part of the business that few people associate with IT are the business applications that run the business and the work that is needed to bring those to staff. That is the key value that IT provides to an organization. How to present processes in screens for staff to do their work, how to do finance, compliance, shipments, customer support, metrics for the business, etc. All this is distributed in companies in different departments, with IT folks being a key enablers to make those projects happen.

Most companies do not get past the “plumbing” aspect of IT, which is the service layer. That’s too bad. There is a whole other side of IT in business applications, process and metrics where the real action, real exciting and value to the business work is at.

I strongly disagree (as a few others have already) that today’s younger generation “get” computers anymore than the generation before them. Social networking sites and iOS devices aren’t very complex by design. I sometimes feel a little guilty for what I’ve been paid to repair ridiculously simple PC issues (stuck CD, explaining the difference between a CAT-5 cable and a telephone wire, etc.)

In my experience in an IT department at a major school district, most of the teachers and faculty simply didn’t have the time or mental energy to dedicate to computer issues. They would rather focus on their jobs, and were happy to let me do mine.

frishack

on 25 Feb 11

Just because you are running this website from your mom’s basement, and the only apps you use are gmail, and chrome doesn’t mean you have the slightest clue about running a modern IT dept for a mid to large size enterprise.

Mom’s calling, your dinner is ready.

greg

on 25 Feb 11

i read this article only because it was referred to on another blog… what a waste of bits…. obviously written by someone without a clue about HIPPA, Sarbanes Oxley, or any number of other governing bodies regarding data security, etc that produces the need for highly technical IT department to implement security measures that ensures the security of the pc’s, networks, servers (including exchange, because gmail don’t meet any of those for security). When’s the last time you went to the hospital? Did they have Electronic Medical Records? Who’s keeping those things connected and running? ME and my team… Nurses are nortoriously computer illiterate…

Lawrence

on 25 Feb 11

Where are the facts? It sounds like it’s all his opinion. Sure a small company with just a website, email and a hand full of computers can easily get by without an IT staff, but what about large companies with high-end needs? Here are some different views.

Matt

Even if you’d use Chrome, Google Apps and Wifi in your company you’ll need an IT-guy when your company gets large enough.

Still less though than when you’d use windows machines with IE and stand-alone apps.

Buddy

on 28 Feb 11

@Eric – so you say that you let your employees at your school district install whatever they want? So when the companies that own said software find out that your school district has, say, 50 copies of their software installed on computers that the school owns and you didn’t pay for said 50 copies who in the IT department is going to get fired when the school has to pay upwards of 50 times a possible $250,000 fine for software piracy?? Just asking.

Ken Eisman

on 28 Feb 11

This article was clearly written with the intent of generating defensive comments or else the author is just venting because he had a recent ‘run in’ with his local IT department.

I know of no one in the IT field that would a 20 person business needs an IT department. They might need a ‘server,’ but not a full-time IT department.

As others have said, those draconian IT policies aren’t developed by the IT department. They come from c-level management with input from HR and Legal. (Or at least that’s the way it should work in a well run company.)

Also, IT is much more than fixing/installing computers, setting up email or even changing passwords. There are complex networking issues, security issues, and above all strategic and tactical IT planning that needs to support the business goals. Most people don’t have, will not have, don’t want to have the skill sets to accomplish those tasks.

Stendor

on 28 Feb 11

This article is dumb and I feel dumber for reading it; you cannot do without IT, and it might be one thing if you are small company with 10 computers and no need for any other technology to stay ahead from the competition. The guy that wrote this article probably is one of those users that think because they know how to install office or windows, be able to open a Gmail account or even run a simple query in excel they know as much as anyone in IT. Also people need to understand there is difference between Information technology and helpdesk. What makes this article even worst is that there are people dumb enough to agree with it. I would like to see a company like Wal-Mart without IT, and again people I’m not talking about the person that goes and restart your computer when it freezes I’m talking about the people behind their infrastructure, the ones that handle the information, the information store in DBs which they use to do data-mining to know what and how the market is behaving and stay ahead from the competition. Why do you think Wal-Mart is so successful? Next I’m going to fire my mechanic because I know how to put gas in my car. Stupid article

HanSQL

on 28 Feb 11

I’ve worked on both sides of the fence, having moved into IT after working for a traditional business for half a decade. While a tiny office might not need IT, any enterprise company would die without a real IT department.
Even if your employees are all tech-savvy Gen-Y kids who text at 160wpm, that does not translate to real IT experience. For example, learning to program is as difficult as learning a spoken language. Learning to program well is even more difficult – a skill that takes 5+ years of real, in-the-trenches work to perfect. That’s not something that your departmental jack-of-all-tech can do well.
In the past few years I’ve seen a much better integration between business users and IT departments, mostly due to Agile development strategies that focus on iterative design of applications based on a constant reprioritization of work to meet the current business need. I think that this trend will continue until poor IT service is just not tolerated. I know that my company certainly doesn’t tolerate it today.

rashinal

on 01 Mar 11

I find it striking that the article and the comments are almost unanimous in equating a “IT person” with a “Microsoft Support” person.
Indeed, the majority of “enterprise” belongs to the MS Universe and therefore, requires a team of dedicated MS aficionados to keep the craft afloat. And, as some pointed out, there are tasks in that realm that even the most “tech-savvy” amateur (“my nephew is a computer genius”) type cannot resolve.
But there is more to IT than just that.
Most of the really important stuff is largely platform agnostic. And from that perspective, I think that the article is correct. However, we necessarily need to rethink the meaning of what an “IT department” does.

Knowing how to configure and troubleshoot exchange/outlook will become irrelevant, once companies discover just how much money they piss away on such crappy and outdated technology.
There WILL come a turning point, despite the entrenched culture’s resistance and vehement exclusion of any alternative that might jeopardize their control (their JOB).
As always, economic feasibility will win out.

Davo

on 01 Mar 11

the company I work for would be royally screwed if there was no I.T. department. Many users can’t work out how to change their own passwords. The entire system would be full of viruses if it wasn’t locked down. Let’s face it. most corpoarate PC users are pretty clueless. The I.T. dept will only stop being necessary until everyone is as tech saavy as the I.T dept themselves.

Rob.S

on 01 Mar 11

But who is making the policies and controlling it, not the IT. What is SOX, ITIL etc. It is not IT made, it is usually government made. Or from auditors. And how do you comply with those regulations?

Roberto

on 01 Mar 11

What a load on nonsense. The more tech savy users have become, the more IT problems have occured, in my IT dept at least. They try to fix things on their own thinking they know everything, make things worse and create more work for our IT Team. The more tech savy people become, the easier it is for them to abuse IT systems, creating a greater need to for IT dept to step up their IT secutity. Also, the more IT knowledge users have now, has meant more intricate requests as they know what systems are capaple of, but dont actaully have the skill to pull it off, again creating more work for IT depts.

A weak article, written by someone that reads ‘Computer Weekly’ too much

Roberto

on 01 Mar 11

What a load on nonsense. The more tech savy users have become, the more IT problems have occured, in my IT dept at least. They try to fix things on their own thinking they know everything, make things worse and create more work for our IT Team. The more tech savy people become, the easier it is for them to abuse IT systems, creating a greater need to for IT dept to step up their IT secutity. Also, the more IT knowledge users have now, has meant more intricate requests as they know what systems are capaple of, but dont actaully have the skill to pull it off, again creating more work for IT depts.

A weak article, written by someone that reads ‘Computer Weekly’ too much

Nick

on 01 Mar 11

I’ve done some light maintenance on my car before, doesn’t make me a mechanic. I’ve done a little work on the house before, doesn’t mean I’m a builder. Just because you set up your wireless router at home, doesn’t mean your an IT expert.

You do your job and leave the IT people to do theirs.

Fred

on 01 Mar 11

You are so far off base, it’s plain to see you have no real understanding of what an IT department actually does.

Your understanding of an IT department is like comparing a CPA to a tax preparer.

Gorilla

on 01 Mar 11

Very good article that resonates some important hallmarks. Though I belive you do Information Technology a disservice by playing the shell game.

Sure more and more companies may outsource from a local on-site provider to a remote cloud-hosted provider; either a hosted platform or more likely hosted apps if they’re running without an IT department. BUT…there will still be an IT department, it will just be run by another company.

This almost sounds like the interns and office workers will be “savvy” enough to do their own job and IT. I fear you are right in what will be attempted as more and more people rush to join the hive. But maintaining some individuality, institutional knowledge, and agility will be the real challenge going forward

If we’re all the same, there’s no need for freedom. Freedom is choice and I fear we are locking in, like many before us already (railroad tracks and midi come to mind) and many may soon find themselves painted into a corner. IT requires a lot more than savvy much in the same way medicine or engineering does. Enthusiasts aren’t going to suddenly carry the mantle of extra work for recognition, and if they do, we have a lot bigger concerns than immagration. LOL

Martin

on 01 Mar 11

OK, I would agree if this was written 10 years ago. In fact you are not describing an IT department but a IT Support department.
IT is now critical for business. Not installing office or deploying a new server. Those are commodites and I agree that you don’t need a whole department for that.
But IT is now part of the business. Systems can make your business processes more eficient reducing costs. Technology opens new sales channels that increases revenue. New technology create new business opportunities and those companies that don’t have a team that can explore them, will be left behind.

Tom Lotito

on 01 Mar 11

It’s interesting in that for years I have enjoyed the “we are the architects of this software and will improve it as we see fit” and then you snap back and rail against a group that seeks to control an environment via standards? Maybe it’s the “End of Arrogance in Technology”? A group of focused, capable and service minded IT pros, as part of a lean department, will always provide value to a company and gasp even help make them more profitable…

TJ

on 01 Mar 11

The assignment I am on now will never, ever be able to move from having an internal IT department as the applications are very custom and change rapidly. You arent doing this “in the cloud” based on my experiences. Great if they work for you and your vanilla requirements but most of my life has been implementing applications that want all of the flavors and sometime many at one time.